• 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
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'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.