Why such high price tags on video games?
18 Jun 2015, 3:59 am
xenocity wrote:
hilaryy_renee_ wrote:
Modern-day video games, especially in today's society, are very costly to make. Since there have been an array of high advancements associated with the graphics and overall production level of video games, the value and price of these games will have to increase exponentially. The company producing these games will need to make a profit, along with the retailers that are selling those games to the general public.
I personally believe that, yes, video games nowadays are definitely more expensive than they used to be, but as the saying goes: "You get what you pay for." So when you're paying a high price tag for a particular video game, you're ultimately paying for the overall quality and "experience" of it.
I personally believe that, yes, video games nowadays are definitely more expensive than they used to be, but as the saying goes: "You get what you pay for." So when you're paying a high price tag for a particular video game, you're ultimately paying for the overall quality and "experience" of it.
Not entirely true.
Ubisoft, EA, WBi, Capcom, Microsoft, etc... have released tons of broken games at $60 price mark which required a few patches before they became stable, they even spent hundreds of millions developing them.
The main reason for the high cost of development, is the fact that Western developers refuse to budget properly and spend that money efficiently/smartly.
They are all chasing the next big cinematic game at all costs.
They could make the necessary changes to structure and culture, that allows them to be more efficient and productive instead of spending money head over heals to the game out within two years.
Though to be fair Rockstar is horrible inefficient studio, which causes to them to spend as much time and money as they do on GTA games.
This Western model is horrible unsustainable, which will eventually lead to a huge consolidation of Western Developers even further.
This also means you need greater and greater sales to earn back that money, which makes each game built on this model hugely risky.
Nintendo on the other hand is able to produce a game like Xenoblade Chronicles X for less than $2 million on Wii U.
Though Skyward Sword (Wii) is currently the most expensive title Nintendo has ever produced at ~$3M due to how long it was in development (~7 years).
With that said Zelda Wii U will be their most expensive game to date due to the development time (over 4 years when completed).
Nearly all of Nintendo's games are less than $1.5M to develop to date.
Companies like Atlus, KT, NLG (Canadian), Monster Games, and even Colossus Order (Cities Skylines on PC | Finnish Developer) are able to make their games for less than $1.5M.
These are decent quality games that are most polished than the big blockbuster titles.
The long story short is, mostly the Western Developers are horribly structured and inefficient, which is leading to the constant increases in their development budgets.
Add marketing on to it and it is even higher.
Yep. All that obsession over cinematics and graphics and such is starting to really bite at them finally, and it's doing more and more damage as time goes on. Games of that sort get more and more shallow, have less content, take much less time to beat.... these things just keep getting worse. Wheras other developers can produce truly amazing games, they just wont have ridiculous graphics. Heck, they dont even need to be even REMOTELY near that level of graphical whatever in order to do well and be amazing. Binding of Isaac: Rebirth for example (on PC and I think it's coming to the 3DS? I forget). This came out last year. It took a game that was already bloody huge, and more than doubled it, while COMPLETELY redoing all of the art that makes it look muuuuuch better. They went from about, what, just under 200 items in the first game, to about 430 in this one; and these are items similar to the various power items found in Zelda games; these typically have major effects and have to be coded very differently, AND every one has to be able to combine/synergize/screw you over with every other item (even if you've got like 20 at once) since that's a HUGE part of the game. Add in a bazillion new enemies, over 50 bosses now, and so on.... and this game that I paid like, what, $15 for, can give hundreds, even thousands of hours to many players, and it's a freaking incredible game at that. I consider it one of my favorites of all time now. For $15! It's a hugely popular one, at that.
Wheras I could go buy a AAA game, pay four times as much, and get like 8 crappy hours of shallow gameplay out of it. Half of which would be cutscenes that I dont care about. ....yay?
I mean, really, it's just gotten ridiculous these days. Heck, for as much as I've disliked Nintendo over the years, of the big publishers they're the only ones that have been consistently putting out games that have both high quality AND lots of content. They're not skimping on it like everyone else is. They've earned my respect finally, at this point. The others have pretty much lost it, definitely.
And the whole issue will just continue to decline since so many gamers are completely obsessed over graphics and having "sophisticated" games. No, seriously, I heard that one earlier, where someone was whining about games like Splatoon and Mario because "Well I like my games to be more SOPHISTICATED than that kiddie crap". Which to me often translates to: "I want to seem more sophisticated/intellectual in front of my friends". By playing a brainless shooter like CoD. Does not compute. Does not WANT to compute.
23 Jun 2015, 1:24 pm
alex wrote:
Fibbox wrote:
transformingcar wrote:
I won't be surprised if in another few years we see video games with 80 to 100 dollar price tags.
Hehargh! Come to Denmark! It's already a reality here for console games! Here they cost 100-120 dollars, while 3DS games cost about 70 dollars.
Nevertheless.
Prices here in Denmark are really high in retail price and that's why i don't own a console, besides space. I'm more interested in games on Steam, really as the ones i want to play are typically independent or very old games that have been heavily discounted.
Everything in Denmark costs more, not just games. I did notice a lot of people in Denmark love playing games when I was there.
The reason they cost as much as they do is because people are willing to pay that much to get them. People spend well over 10 times the amount of time with a game compared to a movie and yet movie tickets cost more than 1/10th the price of games for the most part.
graphics are just the main thing about buying them. mostly paying for the title, gameplay, developers, publishers, and the factory company to keep your game copy, they placed on the market for better future titles ahead. disc copying and burning plus patching is really hard to maintain budget since the disc has to be rendered 1500 times. the dual cycles are the real issues. then the computers in there have to make sure the ram and the hard drive capacity can run good. there is just more to it than popping in and playing at home. plus the coding issues and patents and the approval from the main brains that have their games put on the consoles. really just really that.
_________________
In order to be free, you must take your chances of letting your tortured self to be forgiven.
27 Jun 2015, 11:41 am
Misery wrote:
xenocity wrote:
hilaryy_renee_ wrote:
Modern-day video games, especially in today's society, are very costly to make. Since there have been an array of high advancements associated with the graphics and overall production level of video games, the value and price of these games will have to increase exponentially. The company producing these games will need to make a profit, along with the retailers that are selling those games to the general public.
I personally believe that, yes, video games nowadays are definitely more expensive than they used to be, but as the saying goes: "You get what you pay for." So when you're paying a high price tag for a particular video game, you're ultimately paying for the overall quality and "experience" of it.
I personally believe that, yes, video games nowadays are definitely more expensive than they used to be, but as the saying goes: "You get what you pay for." So when you're paying a high price tag for a particular video game, you're ultimately paying for the overall quality and "experience" of it.
Not entirely true.
Ubisoft, EA, WBi, Capcom, Microsoft, etc... have released tons of broken games at $60 price mark which required a few patches before they became stable, they even spent hundreds of millions developing them.
The main reason for the high cost of development, is the fact that Western developers refuse to budget properly and spend that money efficiently/smartly.
They are all chasing the next big cinematic game at all costs.
They could make the necessary changes to structure and culture, that allows them to be more efficient and productive instead of spending money head over heals to the game out within two years.
Though to be fair Rockstar is horrible inefficient studio, which causes to them to spend as much time and money as they do on GTA games.
This Western model is horrible unsustainable, which will eventually lead to a huge consolidation of Western Developers even further.
This also means you need greater and greater sales to earn back that money, which makes each game built on this model hugely risky.
Nintendo on the other hand is able to produce a game like Xenoblade Chronicles X for less than $2 million on Wii U.
Though Skyward Sword (Wii) is currently the most expensive title Nintendo has ever produced at ~$3M due to how long it was in development (~7 years).
With that said Zelda Wii U will be their most expensive game to date due to the development time (over 4 years when completed).
Nearly all of Nintendo's games are less than $1.5M to develop to date.
Companies like Atlus, KT, NLG (Canadian), Monster Games, and even Colossus Order (Cities Skylines on PC | Finnish Developer) are able to make their games for less than $1.5M.
These are decent quality games that are most polished than the big blockbuster titles.
The long story short is, mostly the Western Developers are horribly structured and inefficient, which is leading to the constant increases in their development budgets.
Add marketing on to it and it is even higher.
Yep. All that obsession over cinematics and graphics and such is starting to really bite at them finally, and it's doing more and more damage as time goes on. Games of that sort get more and more shallow, have less content, take much less time to beat.... these things just keep getting worse. Wheras other developers can produce truly amazing games, they just wont have ridiculous graphics. Heck, they dont even need to be even REMOTELY near that level of graphical whatever in order to do well and be amazing. Binding of Isaac: Rebirth for example (on PC and I think it's coming to the 3DS? I forget). This came out last year. It took a game that was already bloody huge, and more than doubled it, while COMPLETELY redoing all of the art that makes it look muuuuuch better. They went from about, what, just under 200 items in the first game, to about 430 in this one; and these are items similar to the various power items found in Zelda games; these typically have major effects and have to be coded very differently, AND every one has to be able to combine/synergize/screw you over with every other item (even if you've got like 20 at once) since that's a HUGE part of the game. Add in a bazillion new enemies, over 50 bosses now, and so on.... and this game that I paid like, what, $15 for, can give hundreds, even thousands of hours to many players, and it's a freaking incredible game at that. I consider it one of my favorites of all time now. For $15! It's a hugely popular one, at that.
Wheras I could go buy a AAA game, pay four times as much, and get like 8 crappy hours of shallow gameplay out of it. Half of which would be cutscenes that I dont care about. ....yay?
I mean, really, it's just gotten ridiculous these days. Heck, for as much as I've disliked Nintendo over the years, of the big publishers they're the only ones that have been consistently putting out games that have both high quality AND lots of content. They're not skimping on it like everyone else is. They've earned my respect finally, at this point. The others have pretty much lost it, definitely.
And the whole issue will just continue to decline since so many gamers are completely obsessed over graphics and having "sophisticated" games. No, seriously, I heard that one earlier, where someone was whining about games like Splatoon and Mario because "Well I like my games to be more SOPHISTICATED than that kiddie crap". Which to me often translates to: "I want to seem more sophisticated/intellectual in front of my friends". By playing a brainless shooter like CoD. Does not compute. Does not WANT to compute.
If they really wanted to look intellectual in front of their friends, they'd be playing Professor Layton in front of them. I like Nintendo games because while yeah some of their games are pretty cartoon-y in appearance, they're still way fun to play, and usually require people to actually use their heads to get through the game rather than just brute force. Using Splatoon as an example, when playing the standard Turf Wars online your best bet is to just try to cover as much as possible while not getting splatted, but when you get into ranked strategy really does matter. And in the single-player campaign you have the standard Nintendo puzzle bosses, and through the other levels if you don't take where the enemies are into consideration in the later levels you will end up dead pretty quick. Whereas in CoD you just shoot everything until you're the last one standing.
That said, video games are pretty expensive when they're first released. That's why generally I wait a while after release to get some games, or just buy them used. The latter's way cheaper, IMO.
_________________
My Aspie score: 163 of 200
My NT score: 45 of 200
I am very likely neurodiverse.
