What's The Next Big Pop Cultural Push?

[Metroido]

Nah.

R* abandoned their reputation with GTA Online turning into a money-printing factory and a fairly manipulative rip-off it kid-targeting one at that. Them dumping all GTA V story expansions in order to print more money via GTA Online really was them leaving that rep behind.

.........

There's also the rumor that they're planning to make GTA6 the first $100-200 game.

I don't think there are any big Western studios who really have any rep left. Bungie, Bethesda, BioWare, Blizzard, all the Bs have dented or worse their reps in various ways.

There are Japanese AAA studios who have never meaningfully screwed up - FromSoft comes to mind. Capcom weirdly are one of the few companies whose reputations is improving rather than getting worse, too.

There are still a lot of indie or AA or very small AAA studios who have at least solid reps. Like, SuperGiant have never made a bad game (Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, Hades, Hades 2). Obsidian have never made a bad game. They've made a lot of kind of 8/10 ones, but that's kind of their brand.

I'd say Id and Machine Games are still pretty reliable. After the disaster of Youngblood, Machine Games came back with Indiana Jones which was, I thought, a lot of fun. And Doom: The Dark Ages looks pretty solid.

EDIT: typos

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There's also the rumor that they're planning to make GTA6 the first $100-200 game.

I think it's more likely they'll just make it $80 instead of $70, much as some "industry analysts" and the like are salivating at the prospect of higher-priced games.

Also if they go to $80, they'll still get huge numbers of weird nerds defending them online and saying "It's like, totally justifiable because they chose to spend insane amounts on development, maaaan", but if they got to $100, let alone dramatically more than that, suddenly that support is going to fall off very fast and they're going to start to attract a lot of criticism. I'm sure they'll have some overpriced special editions of course.

id software are in a sort of weird category with Obsidian, they've never made a terrible game, but also they have made a lot of 8/10 or niche ones. Rage 2 is pretty bad but everyone knows that was mainly Avalanche working on it so they kind of get let off that one. I feel like there's an alternative universe where they're still the "one good" AAA developer, but it's one where they were actually less experimental and focused more on just reliably making good FPSes. Doom The Dark Ages looks like it will review really well (because critics love that kind of thing, it's practically critic-bait), sell okay but not quite as well as one would expect, and then like, in two years after release, most gamers won't actually like it very much, just like Doom Eternal, which is like, almost more of a speed puzzle game than a shooter, very skillfully designed but not necessarily much fun to play unless you're really into the specific niche it's for.

 

[Zardnaar]

Tbf games should be in the $100-200 for a single player game. Proportionally vs a PS2
game you should be paying $500-800.

Otherwise it's microtransactions or Nintendo lower powered offerings.

AAA games might price themselves out with development costs.

 

[MGibster]

People at Rockstar had trouble pitching Red Dead Redemption because other people thought Westerns weren't that hot and wouldn't sell. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the biggest games of all time. It has since sold over 50 million units and made over 3.3 billion dollars. Pretty good for a genre that's not "in." The genre is actually irrelevant. The quality of the work is what matters.

I don't believe even the "experts," however we define that, really, truly know what's going to be hot. They can take a guess and hype something up but the public won't necessarily bite maybe because it's bad or for other reasons. Sometimes even making a good game doesn't mean it'll find an audience as we saw with Beyond Good and Evil back in 2003.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Tbf games should be in the $100-200 for a single player game. Proportionally vs a PS2
game you should be paying $500-800.

No lol.

This is nonsense from people who can't do math. You shouldn't repeat it lol.

Games now on average (ignoring the wildest outliers) sell insanely larger numbers of copies than they did in the past. That's what makes them profitable.

Companies have done tons of research into increasing the price, and increasing more than about $10 every decade would cause a huge collapse in full-price sales, so that whilst they might make a much larger revenue per copy sold, they'd overall lose out hugely on revenue.

You can't just look at one part of the equation.

AAA Games might price themselves out of existence but the idea that they "should" cost X because of development cost is nonsense. The only reason development budgets have got so high is that games are STILL very profitable even with development costs that high. It's not like this is some sort of magic.

 

[MGibster]

AAA Games might price themselves out of existence but the idea that they "should" cost X because of development cost is nonsense. The only reason development budgets have got so high is that games are STILL very profitable even with development costs that high. It's not like this is some sort of magic.

I thought about buying Star Wars: Outlaws last week, but at $70 on Steam I decided to opt out. I don't really care what it costs to develop the game, I'm only willing to spend so much. I typically wait for games to age a year or two and buy them on sale. I'm a frugal consumer I guess. Or a cheapskate. But given many companies release games that need immediate patches or don't really fix them until after a year, why should I pay full price?

 

[Zardnaar]

No lol.

This is nonsense from people who can't do math. You shouldn't repeat it lol.

Games now on average (ignoring the wildest outliers) sell insanely larger numbers of copies than they did in the past. That's what makes them profitable.

Companies have done tons of research into increasing the price, and increasing more than about $10 every decade would cause a huge collapse in full-price sales, so that whilst they might make a much larger revenue per copy sold, they'd overall lose out hugely on revenue.

You can't just look at one part of the equation.

AAA Games might price themselves out of existence but the idea that they "should" cost X because of development cost is nonsense. The only reason development budgets have got so high is that games are STILL very profitable even with development costs that high. It's not like this is some sort of magic.

You might want to look at some of the older sales numbers. Eg PS2 and big selling titles eg tetras, Mario etc.

Just on inflation alone games should be around $100.

Whales are paying $500-$800+. Personally I've known $3000 usd and that was 2011.

And you hear the horror stories about tens of thousands of dollars.

Microtransactions espicially from whales are keeping the prices down for everyone else.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You might want to look at some of the older sales numbers. Eg PS2 and big selling titles eg tetras, Mario etc.

I'm well aware, but I already mentioned that:

(ignoring the wildest outliers)

You're talking about the very rarest and most outlying successes, which were very, very rare, and those games were often actually cheaper to develop than less-successful games of the same era.

The vast majority of games sold 5x to 50x fewer copies than a game today might. Like, on the PS2, a full-price game that was pretty successful might sell 100k copies. In the modern day, it's probably cross-platform (because that's insanely easier to do thanks to changes to both engines and consoles themselves - the PS2 and PS3 had nearly unique architecture), and may well say sell "only" 1m copies.

Maybe the PS2 game only cost $1m to develop (which is unlikely, note - most PS2 games cost a fair bit more to develop), and the modern game cost $40m, but which made more profit? The PS2 game was selling physical copies at, say, $50. With physical, 30% of the revenue (or a bit less) gets back to the publisher/developer (lets assume they're the same thing to make this simple), so 50 x 0.3 = $15 per copy, so that's $1.5m total, so you made a profit of $500k. Not great but the right direct. With the modern game, it costs $70, but most or all of your sales will be digital, which means you get 70% of the revenue. 70 x 0.7 = 49. $49 per copy selling 1m copies = $49m. So you made $9m profit.

You can sell "Well as a percentage/ROI that's lower!!!" and sure, but it's a lot more actual money. The per-dollar ROI on non-hit game is probably lower today than in the PS2 era, but the actual money being made is more.

As for "whales are paying X", well, sure, but not for most games - the vast majority of games sold don't have the options you're suggesting. You're mixing together typical single-player games and the most extreme rip-off/gacha multiplayer-only games.

 

[Kaodi]

From a consumer perspective if every game was $500 then every game would need to have 500 hours of fun gameplay - minimum. Like, that is serious, "I bought a Switch just for Breath of the Wild," level territory.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm well aware, but I already mentioned that:

You're talking about the very rarest and most outlying successes, which were very, very rare, and those games were often actually cheaper to develop than less-successful games of the same era.

The vast majority of games sold 5x to 50x fewer copies than a game today might. Like, on the PS2, a full-price game that was pretty successful might sell 100k copies. In the modern day, it's probably cross-platform (because that's insanely easier to do thanks to changes to both engines and consoles themselves - the PS2 and PS3 had nearly unique architecture), and may well say sell "only" 1m copies.

Maybe the PS2 game only cost $1m to develop (which is unlikely, note - most PS2 games cost a fair bit more to develop), and the modern game cost $40m, but which made more profit? The PS2 game was selling physical copies at, say, $50. With physical, 30% of the revenue (or a bit less) gets back to the publisher/developer (lets assume they're the same thing to make this simple), so 50 x 0.3 = $15 per copy, so that's $1.5m total, so you made a profit of $500k. Not great but the right direct. With the modern game, it costs $70, but most or all of your sales will be digital, which means you get 70% of the revenue. 70 x 0.7 = 49. $49 per copy selling 1m copies = $49m. So you made $9m profit.

You can sell "Well as a percentage/ROI that's lower!!!" and sure, but it's a lot more actual money. The per-dollar ROI on non-hit game is probably lower today than in the PS2 era, but the actual money being made is more.

As for "whales are paying X", well, sure, but not for most games - the vast majority of games sold don't have the options you're suggesting. You're mixing together typical single-player games and the most extreme rip-off/gacha multiplayer-only games.

From memory I read an article a typical PS2 game cost 4 million to make.

Shenmue was the most expensive game for a while back then on the Dreamcast.

Adjusted for inflation most expensive back then is close to typical now for AAA.

Think the first 200 million dollar game was 2010.