Are Games Too Expensive? Part One

In the first part of a new series of articles, TheSixthAxis takes a look at the gaming prices of yesteryear and just how they stack up against modern gaming.

This week they go all the way back to 1991, the days of the Amiga. Remember picking up a title for just £20?

[Jackhass]

My bank account definitely feels the pinch sometimes.

[Yi-Long]

... and some aren't. Very simple.

It all just depends on the game, how good it is, how long it is, how much it cost to make, etc etc.

Plus, it differs from person to person. One man's piece of crap could be another man's beloved masterpiece.

Is NFS The Run worth 50 bucks? Probably not. Is Skyrim worth 50 bucks? It probably is.

What IS certain though, is that it's ridiculous that MOST games are being released at 50 bucks, while certainly many of them are not worth it...

... but luckily the prices are going down more quickly nowadays, so when you have a little patience (and don't fall for the whole DLC-scamming thing), gaming isn't TOO expensive.

[tmoss726]

Most games are released at $60.....

[Yi-Long]

... I know, but N4G has an international crowd, so games get released at 35-40 pounds, 50-60 euros, and usually 60 dollars or more...

... so I just used 50 'bucks' as an estimate where most of the people here can feel comfortable with.

[LackTrue4K]

i think, some games (AAA) are worth it, others (most 3th party games) are not thou!!!

[iamtehpwn]

I know this is a controversial view point but Games actually are too cheap what they're worth. During the PS2 era, You made a pretty good profit selling 500k units of a game. Now, In order to make a decent profit, you have to sell around 2 million units.

Development costs are skyrocketing, and the demand for even bigger and expensive games keeps climbing. $60 is actually a pretty cheap.

[vortis]

Dude you're one of those louses who buy into the whole Activision/EA PR bullcrap.

You probably also think it costs Activision $100 million to produce Modern Warfare 3, eh?

Ugh, gamers can be so stupid sometimes. You do know that they cut out mod tools because a handful of talented modders and voice actors could have churned out MW3 in the same time-frame using mod tools, at less than a fraction of the costs?

I hate to say it but many gamers buying brand new games at $60 are idiots.

Here's a few lessons about the industry you don't know.

NO development costs are not rising, they're getting cheaper. Budget mismanagement is rising. It's why a game made by a few students like Q.U.B.E. looks just as good as Portal but didn't cost diddly squat to make.

NO development tools are not getting more expensive they're getting cheaper. You can literally do your own mo-cap sessions in your living room using iPi's Kinect middleware. You just need two Kinects and a decent rig. It sure beats paying $1 mil plus to a Hollywood mo-cap studio to do it for you.

NO graphics do not make the budget of games go up despite claims that they do. UDK has assets and tools FOR FREE along with Unity and countless other middleware companies to help big and small studios alike to churn out high-quality looking games for less than a few grand. It's how a game like Desert Zombie has the same visual fidelity as Gears of War (look it up on the app store if you need an example).

And finally, NO it does not take devs longer and more resources to churn out games. It's just the opposite. A lot of the money goes towards stupid stuff like rebooting a game that's been in development for a couple of years like 2K Marin's XCOM or Kojima Studios' version of Metal Gear Solid: Rising. Ballooned costs from dumb creative decisions (and more mismanagement) is carried over to the consumer. It's not our fault the corporate heads are greedy and that sometimes dev heads are indecisive.

$60 is not pretty cheap especially considering that we're getting far less in games (in terms of playability and content) compared to what we used to get from PS2/Xbox titles back during 2003-2005 (i.e., GTA San Andreas, True Crime Streets of L.A., Jade Dynasty, FF XII, etc.)

Get off the publisher's d!cks and start thinking and researching for yourself. We shouldn't be paying $60 just because they say so. Some games are worth it (i.e., Skyrim, Uncharted, GTA) others are not (Bodycount, Dead to Rights, Two Worlds).

[iamtehpwn]

@Vortis
I am developer myself. In fact, Here's a video of some gameplay of my game:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Development tools are getting cheaper, yes, in fact I've developed that game with UDK myself. But I don't think you understand that those pretty graphics aren't free or cheap to produce.
I'm too lazy and studying for a test I have to take soon to write a long reply as to why but here are some random links I found on google:

http://www.escapistmagazine...

http://gametheoryonline.com...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/3593...

[vortis]

I understand that artists aren't cheap but resources still are. You can use your phone to take a snapshot of a wall or a shirt and use it for a texture. It just means getting creative about how you acquire assets and a lot of times people spend more than they have to to grab assets.

Look at the Euclideon Engine for example, that there would cut costs down drastically because you could just laser sample in environments and standard textures/models like houses/buildings as opposed to paying people to model and texture them.

I still believe a lot of the money is being mismanaged more than it is anything else. There are also tons of free models/assets available for devs to use to help churn out high quality visuals on the cheap.

How else would modders be able to completely recreate STALKER on the CryEngine or completely redesign Perfect Dark Zero from the groundup on the Source Engine without going bankrupt?

[resistance100]

I remember having to pay £50 for N64 titles so i don't mind paying less than that for current generation titles :)

[hiredhelp]

Do you remember paying £9.99 for AAA game that came in a box that loaded in a tape deck, or go to local shop buy budget £2.99 game.
Prices are crazy taxes and vat are even worse.

[Ulf]

No.

Pretty simple question, really. If they were cheaper, we'd still be playing games on the Wii, and machines very similar to it, because the budget wouldn't be there to support anything better. If they were more expensive, the number of consumers would drop off and there might be less revenue, and potentially less profit.

The question in my mind, as of late, is: how will next gen games fare, when priced the same, but requiring twice the investment?

Gamers are ready to see the next gen. Hardware is nearly ready to support the next gen, but... are publishers ready to fund it?

[vortis]

Dude you're assuming next-gen requires more resources. Why would they? Unreal Engine 3 can already produce Samaritan quality graphics in real-time, the HARDWARE is where the problem lies.

A lot of you console gamers are paying $60 for gimped ports where three to six months of development isn't even spent on content or quality but on optimizing the game to run less than what it should.

Look at games like Hard Reset and Duke Nukem Reloaded...these are indie titles that look better than anything on the consoles and don't have big budgets.

You guys need to stop buying into the corporate BS about rising cost of development, they're just using that as an excuse to charge more. Indie devs prove you don't need $100 million to make good looking games. You just need good software support and a creative idea.

[Ulf]

"Indie devs prove you don't need $100 million to make good looking games."

Name one that looks remotely as good as GTA4, which is the only game I know of, that cost $100M.

[Pikajew]

It depends where you buy them. If you get them off Amazon or Steam you can have great sales

[Skynetone]

how hard would it be to make a online pong game

4/8/12 player online

im still waiting for a chess/checkers online game

they dont have to be multi million pound games, lets get some basic games out there

my favorite game this gen is savage moon

[pucpop]

I mean, who didn't play pirated Amiga games!!

[kma2k]

i always look at it in hours of entertainment per hour. A movie can cost $1o-$15 & last about an hour to two. Most games cost $60 when new & give you well about even 10 hours of gameplay. So for what you get per dollar spent i think gamming is a bargain!

[Bathyj]

No, no theyre not. People are just tightarses and dont like paying for the things they want.

1993, a young Bathyj, already a gaming veteran at 19 years of age, pays AU$135 for Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting on SNES. I worked, I saved and I bought the things I wanted.

Almost 2 decades later, game development budgets have increased probably 100fold yet the recommended retail price of games is still 100 bucks and usually actually sell for less than that.

And thats Australian prices, which are high compared to the rest of the world (except the poor Kiwis). USA and Europe get it easy.

[ShaunCameron]

I don't think it is. Video game prices now are just marginally higher than they were in the 1990's considering the development costs and length. If anything, I'm getting 5 to 15x more content for the same price I used to pay 20 years ago especially in genres that were never known for length to begin with (platformer, action, shooter).

[vortis]

Sorry to say but I get 100x more content out of Baldur's Gate and the original X-Com than I do out of any recent RPG that isn't made by Bethesda.