The mention of GTA 6, out in 2025, reminds me of Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick’s comments from an earnings call last year that industry prices are “very, very low” versus the number of hours of playtime games offer and player perception of their value.
I’d generally agree with that, but perhaps with an asterisk on player perception of their value. I’d much rather have a 20 hour Ubisoft open world game than an 80 hour one filled with mandatory padding, but there is definitely a contingent of their customers that want there to be that padding, because they equate hours with value. The length of games has gone up a lot in the past 20 years (often to their detriment, I’d argue), and the price has moved but only barely. The games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring that are 100 hours long without feeling like they’re padded with busy work and checklists in order to finish them? Those games feel like I made off like a bandit at $60. Then you’ve got Hi-Fi Rush, a quality game I’d have happily paid $60 for, that you can finish in 10-15 hours, and Microsoft only charged $30 for it next to a flop like Redfall or another one of those padded games like Starfield for $70 each.
Also worth noting that lots of people like to throw out how much bigger the gaming audience is compared to back in the day as the reason why prices shouldn’t increase, but while that’s true, most of the oxygen in the room is still sucked up by only a handful of winners, and those are the games like Star Wars Outlaws selling you an ultimate edition for $150 with a season pass, because they know you’ll pay it.
The average AAA game should probably find ways to develop the game leaner and faster while still finding that value for people. I think that’s the nut Judas spent 10 years trying to crack, so we’ll see how they did next year.
Gaming prices should not be increasing. They should be decreasing. Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution and gaming makes so much profit its like, more than the entire music and movie industries combined. The number of people that buy games now is huge, there is no justifiable reason for prices to go up other than corporate greed.
Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD. But they didn’t have a lot of the advancements that the gaming industry has today. Aside from the number of people buying games being smaller back then, the cost of manufacturing game cartridges and physical copies was a lot higher than today. Digital distribution was not realistically an option for the PC platform, and was literally not an option for consoles. Game development tools were non-existent. Most game development studios had to program their own game engines, or license one from someone that did. A lot of work was done manually, by human hand for quite some time. Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand. I mean, game engines had a period where a good user interface was unheard of.
Then you look at other issues. Game studios are too big these days. 500 people is too many people working on a project. Bigger ships are slower to turn, lean out the teams to like less than half of that number. Development cycles are too long. Games used to be developed in a year or two, three at the absolute most. Games didn’t used to be as big, but you know what? They don’t need to. A 10 hour game that is paced well with a good story is infinitely better than an 80 hour game where you wander around a 95% empty world experiencing a disjointed barely existent story. Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game. Games don’t need some random pop song in the trailer to get people to buy it, have the composer/sond designer write the trailer music like in the old days, since that was part of their job.
And as you mention, most of the time there are few hits that sell big. This was always true, and will always be true forever. Games don’t really compete with each other except for one resource: the customer’s time. And people have a finite amount of time. Until people begin to have more free time, and infinite time, it doesnt matter how many games are made, they will still always compete for the customer’s time. It is an immutable fact of the gaming industry.
Switching to cheaper media and then digital distribution has reduced costs for distribution, but that’s been eaten entirely and then some by the other problem you call out, which is how much larger the team is and how long the game takes to develop. In order for prices to decrease, that second problem needs to be solved. And sure enough, games made by smaller teams with fewer bells and whistles are cheaper, and there are plenty of those. I’ve played plenty of great ones just this year. By comparison to how many person months go into something like Baldur’s Gate 3 compared to something like Conscript, it’s amazing and perhaps even absurd that it only costs me three times as much as Conscript.
There’s a bigger factor at play which I think is barrier to entry. Now you got individuals or small team of devs being able to publish games themselves on places like Steam, and add to the already huge amount of products that are competing with each other for sales. Used to be in the past when barrier was high these large publishers could gate keep, but now they can’t. And they have to fight ants too instead of just other few whales.
And these small ants have games that catch hype despite being lower budget and worse graphics. It’s a different landscape now. Even reviewers aren’t just some few large outlets they can control anymore, but individuals spread across sharing their opinions and discoveries on social media and places like Steam reviews. Much harder now to control products like in the past.
Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution
Hate to break it to you, but disc space, servers, paying people to ensure servers don’t go down isn’t really cheap. Sure, it means they can effectively sell copies infinitely, and that the costs of distribution are much lower than they were when you had to have a physical product, but that does not make the cost of distribution zero. Valve spends a metric fuckton of money and effort making their service super resilient to downtime and resilient to hackers.
Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD
DOOM was shareware. Pretty sure it was $30. DOOM was the most widely installed software on the planet. Their small team and lack of real advertising budget is referenced by Gabe Newell as one of the things that got him thinking about digital distribution to begin with.
Newell said: “[id] … didn’t even distribute through retail, it distributed through bulletin boards and other pre-internet mechanisms. To me, that was a lightning bolt. Microsoft was hiring 500-people sales teams and this entire company was 12 people, yet it had created the most widely distributed software in the world. There was a sea change coming.”
Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game.
I mean, we’re not living in 1993 and DOOM isn’t the only game. Every day, hundreds of new games are released. How will you get yours noticed by anyone?
DOOM didn’t have that kind of competition. Indie titles of the modern era do.
Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand.
And game engines that you don’t have to build yourself can cost quite a large amount of money to license the use of.
Games didn’t used to be as big, but you know what?
Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall would like to have a chat.
I agree with all of this and it’s nice to see some folks starting to accept that these cost more to make than movies and provide hundreds of hours more content than films, and perhaps its time to start adjusting pricing to match that. Especially with companies like Larian who are doing the right things with things like using Intimacy Coordinators, the lack of which in most of the industry was part of why voice actors went on strike. Larian was just using something Hollywood has used for decades, because there is a modicum of respect for the actors, but they didn’t get to sell their game at a higher price despite doing more to treat their employees well.
I think that’s the nut Judas spent 10 years trying to crack
Do you think so? I kind of figured the ten years was them trying to get the “narrative legos” thing right.
Narrative Legos was a concept to solve that problem. A game like Civilization is built to be systemic, and people can play that base game and be satisfied, and then you’ve got an affordable avenue to add content into the middle of the game and sell people new features that add a lot of content without taking a lot of work, like story-driven DLC typically takes for a game like Mass Effect or BioShock. So, that is a means to reduce costs, long-term, if they nail it. A systemic, story-driven game is one that can afford to be shorter while still demanding $60-$70, since you’re meant to replay it. Then again, it sounds like they steered that game into just being a roguelite eventually, so maybe not every part of the concept worked.
Honestly, if you don’t care about all the nice graphics and music and such, Unciv – a reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android – does demonstrate that the game doesn’t really need all those assets to be perfectly playable.
That being said, I do enjoy the music and the graphics (though the responsiveness of Unciv is nice).
I always read Narrative Legos as Levine’s frustration with the limitations of storytelling in games like System Shock 2/Bioshock (his babies). It seemed like he wanted a way for stories to be able to grow naturally based on choices made (somewhat like BG3, but more organic in nature, happening without having to necessarily be coded as such). Although that’s probably because I’m more interested in the writing games side than programming games side, so my thoughts went to what it meant for writing.
However, I can see what you mean about how that can also impact the cost of development because now you can add more narrative to the game without it having to be such a separate, stand-alone piece (like DLC and Expansion Packs of yesteryear). So, interesting perspective, thank you for sharing it.
He’s called out Civilization and DLC specifically as the inspiration for this experiment, but perhaps I missed another article where it was also intended to solve some limitation. One thing I’m sure of though is that Levine’s criticism of his own work always finds its way into the story of his next game, haha.
Movies are way too expensive and make a bad example to say games should be more expensive. Inflation made people have less expandable money for luxury products but games don’t get cheaper for some reason. Movies have become so expensive that people go less and less to the cinema, even in areas where everything is clean, perfect audio and nice seats. Streaming might be cheaper but most can’t use an expensive bass sound system at home, so that’s not it.
Games have become to ambitious and that’s the publishers fault all alone. Now they try to convince everyone to pay more for games instead of stopping their miss management and you walk right into this trap.
I’d generally agree with that, but perhaps with an asterisk on player perception of their value. I’d much rather have a 20 hour Ubisoft open world game than an 80 hour one filled with mandatory padding, but there is definitely a contingent of their customers that want there to be that padding, because they equate hours with value. The length of games has gone up a lot in the past 20 years (often to their detriment, I’d argue), and the price has moved but only barely. The games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring that are 100 hours long without feeling like they’re padded with busy work and checklists in order to finish them? Those games feel like I made off like a bandit at $60. Then you’ve got Hi-Fi Rush, a quality game I’d have happily paid $60 for, that you can finish in 10-15 hours, and Microsoft only charged $30 for it next to a flop like Redfall or another one of those padded games like Starfield for $70 each.
Also worth noting that lots of people like to throw out how much bigger the gaming audience is compared to back in the day as the reason why prices shouldn’t increase, but while that’s true, most of the oxygen in the room is still sucked up by only a handful of winners, and those are the games like Star Wars Outlaws selling you an ultimate edition for $150 with a season pass, because they know you’ll pay it.
The average AAA game should probably find ways to develop the game leaner and faster while still finding that value for people. I think that’s the nut Judas spent 10 years trying to crack, so we’ll see how they did next year.
Gaming prices should not be increasing. They should be decreasing. Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution and gaming makes so much profit its like, more than the entire music and movie industries combined. The number of people that buy games now is huge, there is no justifiable reason for prices to go up other than corporate greed.
Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD. But they didn’t have a lot of the advancements that the gaming industry has today. Aside from the number of people buying games being smaller back then, the cost of manufacturing game cartridges and physical copies was a lot higher than today. Digital distribution was not realistically an option for the PC platform, and was literally not an option for consoles. Game development tools were non-existent. Most game development studios had to program their own game engines, or license one from someone that did. A lot of work was done manually, by human hand for quite some time. Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand. I mean, game engines had a period where a good user interface was unheard of.
Then you look at other issues. Game studios are too big these days. 500 people is too many people working on a project. Bigger ships are slower to turn, lean out the teams to like less than half of that number. Development cycles are too long. Games used to be developed in a year or two, three at the absolute most. Games didn’t used to be as big, but you know what? They don’t need to. A 10 hour game that is paced well with a good story is infinitely better than an 80 hour game where you wander around a 95% empty world experiencing a disjointed barely existent story. Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game. Games don’t need some random pop song in the trailer to get people to buy it, have the composer/sond designer write the trailer music like in the old days, since that was part of their job.
And as you mention, most of the time there are few hits that sell big. This was always true, and will always be true forever. Games don’t really compete with each other except for one resource: the customer’s time. And people have a finite amount of time. Until people begin to have more free time, and infinite time, it doesnt matter how many games are made, they will still always compete for the customer’s time. It is an immutable fact of the gaming industry.
Switching to cheaper media and then digital distribution has reduced costs for distribution, but that’s been eaten entirely and then some by the other problem you call out, which is how much larger the team is and how long the game takes to develop. In order for prices to decrease, that second problem needs to be solved. And sure enough, games made by smaller teams with fewer bells and whistles are cheaper, and there are plenty of those. I’ve played plenty of great ones just this year. By comparison to how many person months go into something like Baldur’s Gate 3 compared to something like Conscript, it’s amazing and perhaps even absurd that it only costs me three times as much as Conscript.
There’s a bigger factor at play which I think is barrier to entry. Now you got individuals or small team of devs being able to publish games themselves on places like Steam, and add to the already huge amount of products that are competing with each other for sales. Used to be in the past when barrier was high these large publishers could gate keep, but now they can’t. And they have to fight ants too instead of just other few whales.
And these small ants have games that catch hype despite being lower budget and worse graphics. It’s a different landscape now. Even reviewers aren’t just some few large outlets they can control anymore, but individuals spread across sharing their opinions and discoveries on social media and places like Steam reviews. Much harder now to control products like in the past.
Hate to break it to you, but disc space, servers, paying people to ensure servers don’t go down isn’t really cheap. Sure, it means they can effectively sell copies infinitely, and that the costs of distribution are much lower than they were when you had to have a physical product, but that does not make the cost of distribution zero. Valve spends a metric fuckton of money and effort making their service super resilient to downtime and resilient to hackers.
DOOM was shareware. Pretty sure it was $30. DOOM was the most widely installed software on the planet. Their small team and lack of real advertising budget is referenced by Gabe Newell as one of the things that got him thinking about digital distribution to begin with.
I mean, we’re not living in 1993 and DOOM isn’t the only game. Every day, hundreds of new games are released. How will you get yours noticed by anyone?
DOOM didn’t have that kind of competition. Indie titles of the modern era do.
And game engines that you don’t have to build yourself can cost quite a large amount of money to license the use of.
Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall would like to have a chat.
I agree with all of this and it’s nice to see some folks starting to accept that these cost more to make than movies and provide hundreds of hours more content than films, and perhaps its time to start adjusting pricing to match that. Especially with companies like Larian who are doing the right things with things like using Intimacy Coordinators, the lack of which in most of the industry was part of why voice actors went on strike. Larian was just using something Hollywood has used for decades, because there is a modicum of respect for the actors, but they didn’t get to sell their game at a higher price despite doing more to treat their employees well.
Do you think so? I kind of figured the ten years was them trying to get the “narrative legos” thing right.
Narrative Legos was a concept to solve that problem. A game like Civilization is built to be systemic, and people can play that base game and be satisfied, and then you’ve got an affordable avenue to add content into the middle of the game and sell people new features that add a lot of content without taking a lot of work, like story-driven DLC typically takes for a game like Mass Effect or BioShock. So, that is a means to reduce costs, long-term, if they nail it. A systemic, story-driven game is one that can afford to be shorter while still demanding $60-$70, since you’re meant to replay it. Then again, it sounds like they steered that game into just being a roguelite eventually, so maybe not every part of the concept worked.
Honestly, if you don’t care about all the nice graphics and music and such, Unciv – a reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android – does demonstrate that the game doesn’t really need all those assets to be perfectly playable.
That being said, I do enjoy the music and the graphics (though the responsiveness of Unciv is nice).
I always read Narrative Legos as Levine’s frustration with the limitations of storytelling in games like System Shock 2/Bioshock (his babies). It seemed like he wanted a way for stories to be able to grow naturally based on choices made (somewhat like BG3, but more organic in nature, happening without having to necessarily be coded as such). Although that’s probably because I’m more interested in the writing games side than programming games side, so my thoughts went to what it meant for writing.
However, I can see what you mean about how that can also impact the cost of development because now you can add more narrative to the game without it having to be such a separate, stand-alone piece (like DLC and Expansion Packs of yesteryear). So, interesting perspective, thank you for sharing it.
He’s called out Civilization and DLC specifically as the inspiration for this experiment, but perhaps I missed another article where it was also intended to solve some limitation. One thing I’m sure of though is that Levine’s criticism of his own work always finds its way into the story of his next game, haha.
Movies are way too expensive and make a bad example to say games should be more expensive. Inflation made people have less expandable money for luxury products but games don’t get cheaper for some reason. Movies have become so expensive that people go less and less to the cinema, even in areas where everything is clean, perfect audio and nice seats. Streaming might be cheaper but most can’t use an expensive bass sound system at home, so that’s not it.
Games have become to ambitious and that’s the publishers fault all alone. Now they try to convince everyone to pay more for games instead of stopping their miss management and you walk right into this trap.