While I can understand the motivation, I do think it does indeed have a strong negative effect on games. Best games come from creative people that are willing to take a risk. Others games will end up like you said, on the lowest common denominator, mass appeal being the primary goal.

I can also understand game developers wanting to have at least some form of job security. Although certainly interesting, I really don't envy developers of large game publishers from what we heard in some reports.

Cinemas are more successful than theatres... Maybe games that we remember fondly and think are representative for games will be pushed into a market for connoisseurs.

I don't think the industry changed in that regard. Its goal was always to make as much money as possible. What changed is that there are a lot more tools now to make money.

I'm not entirely certain of the correct path to take, but I know that appealing to the lowest common denominator will not allow gaming to become the grand artistic medium for the masses that so many hoped it could be.

There's more to gaming than AAA mainstream titles. Just like film has its summer blockbusters and also art house films and genre pieces, etc. If you're fed up with the current offerings, I'm sure there are a ton of classics you've yet to consume as well.

I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a path to explicitly seek out per se, but if it's one you're already walking, it's a great thing to realize and be empowered by.

The other part was a resentment at constantly having things changed out from under you as a player.

After a certain point, I realized I could probably put a bit more effort into making my mark on the real world, where at least I had the satisfaction of knowing I'd accomplished something that wouldn't disappear just because some 0's and 1's got jumbled.

- Heavy Rain

- Beyond 2 Souls

- Detroit: Become Human

- Witcher 3

- Horizon Zero Dawn

- Mass Effect Series

And then there are classic adventure type games from http://www.WadjetEyeGames.com

Those don't include any micro transaction and you pay once upfront.

I completely disagree with you here. Yes there are games which have micro transactions, many of which did not have them in the past, but that doesn't mean that awesome immersice games that only charge users once are dead. They're even more available now. The Witcher is a usually touted as the prime example, although it's a few years old at this point. PS4 has a few exceptional titles like God of War, Horizon, Days Gone, Uncharted, Spiderman, Ni no Kuno, Shadow of the Colossus RDR 2, in the last year. The switch has games like Captain Toad, Mario Odyssey, breath of the Wild, Mario Kart, Case of Distrust, super smash Bros while PC had Frostpunk, Hitman 2, Battletech, Into the Breach.

All excellent games in their own right, all released in the last 12 months, as standalone experiences. If you want to you can jump into any number of paid for multiplayer (division 2, world of Warcraft, destiny, COD, PUBG) or f2p (Fortnite - disclaimer I work on it, Warframe, League of Legends, path of exile, PlanetSide, Apex Legends). Yes some of those games have micro transactions, but for the most part they don't actually interfere with the game. Yes you can cherry-pick some of my specific examples and tell me in wrong, but you can't even begin to claim that gaming is in a bad state right now.

AAA gaming is in an ATROCIOUS state right now. The rest of the landscape is pretty alright, with the Epic store burgeoning a second wave of indie developers getting off the ground and making waves thanks to the much lower cost to them to publish, and with first-party publishers putting out consistently amazing experiences.

However, behind that you have the larger, multiplatform, absolutely bank-breaking budget weilding AAA developers, putting out your CODs and your FIFAs, one of which happens to hold exclusive rights to Star Wars, all of them making cookie cutter, focus group tested, streamline developed S-H-I-T. The same damn games, over and over, ad nauseum, all of which are now pivoting to chase the Battle Royale fad because everybody wants to now be Fortnite despite the fact that Fortnite already exists and is being played, and the people who have that don't need or want another Fortnite.

From skimming over your references roughly 40 percent of your examples have micro transactions and about 40 percent do not have rich narratives. Yes, I pulled these numbers out of my ass and you can nitpick them all you want, but I work in the gaming industry and know what I am talking about /s

I'm not saying that there aren't greedy game companies, or outright nefarious practices; but speaking as an industry insider I can at least understand why the entire industry has lurched this way.

There's 3 things that you must take on faith are true:

1) Microtransactions bring in money.

2) Games cost more to produce than they ever have.

3) Roughly 90% of gamers are very price sensitive.

So, if you leave out micro transactions, then your budget is slashed and you have to make a lesser game, you might think this is fine, but our competitors will (and do, because we have a very tight policy regarding microtransactions) walk all over us in terms of budget. R&D is expensive and we'll be playing catch-up for years.

You could of course, attempt to keep the budget and not introduce micro-transactions. You could argue that our games make a modest profit even without monetisation but that's certainly not always true, and the closer we move to operating on the breadline the more likely we are to make "safe" choices because risking anything could put hundreds of people out of work (and, we are guilty of this in some cases; see: Assassins Creed)

Finally you could say: well, if the cost of producing games has increased, why not increase the base price instead of chopping it up into add-ons to create special editions and in-game content that needs to be purchased. The answer is of course that if we raise the base price people will be outraged, games can be expensive (if you only play a handful of hours they are more expensive than a movie ticket, but obviously the cost-per-hour of entertainment goes down if you enjoy the game- still, there is personal risk for this) so people aren't willing to risk $100-$120 for a base game, in fact, many people wait for the game to come down in price before buying (as high as 15% of players based on the last time I looked at our market segmentation).

I mean, I understand, it's not enriching your experience to have paywalled content inside the game. But what you don't realise is that a lot of the content that even made it in to the base game, made it in on the fact that there are people who _really_ want to buy a special hat.

• Make newly-released games cost $80+

• Stop the price from dropping so quickly

Everyone seems to think the former will be catastrophic, but consider that after adjusting for inflation, game prices have fallen significantly over the past 15 years or so.

The latter option is easier said than done (since the price is still largely determined by the used resale market), but Nintendo always manages it somehow, so I'm inclined to think it's possible.

fwiw I'm referring to the people who wait for the first price drop (which is roughly 20%), but there are a larger amount of people doing as you say, often waiting a full year. But the picture isn't clear on why they wait- it could easily be that they're waiting for the game to be in a good state and it's hubristic to assume intent like that.

Regardless, I think your broader point isn't echoed in the sentiment from gamers at large. I say "I think" because I'm a technologist and it's not my business to know, although I sit on the same floor as our Consumer Market Knowledge team, and I pick up some things. -- but I can see clearly what I have described just by taking a cursory look at any discussion gamers have regarding the price of games and monetisation.

It's a hotly discussed topic, especially on reddit where there are good examples that you can find immediately[0][1]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/blsmca/should_o...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bbl4cd/how_have_gam...

We're not going to know how consumers actually respond until someone has the guts to try raising prices on a sufficiently large scale.

Mind, I think the better strategy might be to just stop game prices from dropping so quickly. Again, this seems to work extremely well for Nintendo.

> But the picture isn't clear on why they wait- it could easily be that they're waiting for the game to be in a good state and it's hubristic to assume intent like that.

This is its own problem—why are you giving consumers an extra incentive to wait until the game costs less and you will make less money?

Release dates ought to be pushed back by however long is necessary to fix essential problems. This would ultimately benefit both developers and players.

There are, of course, some bugs that will not be discovered until a game has been played by lots of people, so patches will always be desirable. But this is not how post-release game patches are being used today.

Depends what you define as "essential", most problems evolve due to a meta that exists in a game, or is otherwise subjective or only appearing at grand scale.

Others (bugs, mostly) can have a reproduction rate of 1:500,000; We will never find those issues until millions of people have crossed that exact path.

I agree to the principle.

Anyway, when it comes to discounting the game publishers actually don't get much choice, nintendo can do their own thing because they own the platform and the IP; but Sony, Microsoft and especially Valve are absolutely punishing in pushing game costs down shortly after a release. For them, selling more units before the IP is out of the public mind is much more important than having some kind of bigger profit over a longer term.

But this is getting incredibly off-topic.

I'm only familiar with PS4, but it's much, much quicker than that today.

Battlefield V [1] was released Nov 20 2018 for $60, in Dec 6 it was $36 (60% of original in 16 days), and in Dec 18 it was $30 (50% in 28 days) with PS Plus, which you need anyway to play multiplayer.

God of War [2], to take another example not plagued by BFV's troubled release and also being a single-player game, it took at bit longer to go down. It was released in April 20 2018, was down to $50 (83%) in June 8, $34 (58%) with PS+ in Aug 17, and $22 (37%) in Nov 16.

You really pay a premium to play at launch day or a couple of days early by pre-ordering. If you wait a month you usually have the first discount.

There's a nice community at Reddit called Patient Gamers [3]. You don't have to take vow to never buy new games, but people there usually wait at least six months before buying a game. Three super nice benefits of that:

1. Games are cheaper.

2. The game has been patched to fix bugs or add more content.

3. You can read reviews or check the Metacritic page to see if the game is actually as good as claimed or if it's hype based on the trailer. You can watch some real gameplay not carefully produced by the designers.

Still, a lot of people apparently pre-order games or buy mega-deluxe editions for $100, so game companies can get money from that group and then lower the prize a month later for the rest of the gamers.

[1] https://psprices.com/region-us/game/2347184/battlefield-v

[2] https://psprices.com/region-us/game/1382035/god-of-war

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/

Why is this? Where is the increased cost coming from?

It takes roughly 1,000 people 7+ years to make a "new IP" game, or the same number of people 3-5 years for a decent sequel.

Check the number of people credited in a game from 20 years ago and compare it to the latest AAA's, it's an order of magnitude or two different.

GTA1 took 50 people to make[0]

The Division took 1,083 to make[1]

Yet the price of games has not increased in real terms in that time. (although, yes, the sales have increased, but not enough)

[0]: https://www.giantbomb.com/grand-theft-auto/3030-13567/credit...

[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/tom-clancys-the-divis...

Yet the price of games has not increased in real terms in that time.

The "price" of a game isn't a good measurement, as people are paying on top of that via microtransactions.

I'm not sure I can Google this up, but I remember when the PS4 era was just starting up, Shamus Young (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ ) hypothesized that the gaming industry was going to have an even harder time justifying the expense of a "true" PS4 game because of the yet-again increased expense of the asset pipeline. Assets are technically getting cheaper to generate over time, but they're not getting cheaper faster than they're getting more expensive. The PS5 may yet make this worse again, and the continuous PC market is definitely getting crazy to build for the top end. Eventually, even microtransactions aren't going to be able to cover this, and the only games that can be made are going to be so "safe" that nobody at all will like them. This is a sort of bubble that is going to burst at some point. It's arguable that it's already starting to burst; it seems like we're seeing a slowly increasing number of very high-profile, very expensive failures, and that can't continue forever. Keep an eye on Nintendo's strategy (if they continue making boatloads of money with their Switch on the complexity foothills while the rest of market is climbing so high up the complexity mountain that they are gasping for breath, eventually people with lots of initials in their titles in other companies are going to start asking why they can't do what Nintendo is doing), and the indie market.

I do sometimes wonder if movies will see this as well. Right now, most movies that cost significant fractions of a billion dollars will make it back, but as that number goes up, it takes proportionally less and less to screw up things really quickly, even if you're profitable most of the time. Star Wars, for instance, is quite unexpectedly in a dangerous spot right now, profit-wise. If for instance the Marvel movies had the same problems, we could see a sea change in movie finances in a few years. But it doesn't seem to be happening yet.

I always felt that the grinding in the early games was as frustrating as the looting that came after.

I did that for years and I never batted an eyelid. I enjoyed the levelling and the returns those gave, I enjoyed the mindless attacking sprites all-day and the optimisation that allowed me, I enjoyed sharing that load with friends (new and old, real and digital).

I'm not your OP but I can absolutely say I would love to relive a year of that life given genie-magic.

I remember spending some summer days like that from time to time.