Which ones?

The big yearly franchises rake in tons of cash, just as superheroes do at the movie theatre. But if you go a bit deeper, the situation is more mixed. Bioshock Infinite just about bankrupted Irrational Games, for instance, despite being very well-received.

The big publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Zenimax) have had numerous record years. Irrational Games has been a subsidiary of Take Two since before Bioshock Infinite.

That doesn't mean the individual games or studios were profitable.

https://www.polygon.com/2014/2/21/5431332/what-irrational-ga...

> Earlier this month, Irrational co-founder Ken Levine announced that less than a year after the release of BioShock Infinite, the studio would be "winding down," which meant that everyone but Levine and 15 others were being laid off.

I mean that whether or not the studio closes is at the parent companies whims.

According to Wikipedia, Bioshock Infinite sold 11 million copies. If your development is so costly that 11 million sales, vastly higher than most games sell, isn’t a success then maybe you should go out of business. That’s not a price point problem but a budgeting problem with unrealistic expectations.

If you look at the top selling games, the top 50 ever bottom out at 20 million sales so they were half way to being on the top 50. If your game has to be in or close to the top fifty selling games of all time in order to be profitable then you’ve planned something very wrong.

Isn't the other possibility, though, that the game was just too cheap at $60? And only launch, mind you—I do think another issue here is just how quickly even high-demand games get marked down in price. (This is not entirely in the manufacturer's control—but Nintendo somehow always manages to maintain the prices of their games. Nintendo is doing something smart which no one else is doing...)

I don't know about you, but I like big-budget games! I don't think Bioshock Infinite would have been as good if they had to pair back the art team that constructed that gorgeous floating city, or lowered the amount of experimental iterations which made it possible to get the gameplay feel just right!

Do you think games are piced at $60 and marketed down because publishers are being generous?? Those price points are set exactly because they are expected to extract the most profits.

> I don't know about you, but I like big-budget games!

I like some big budget games, but most of what's been released by the big publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) has been, lets say, lackluster. Those are the games with the biggest budgets and quite frankly, they tend to be all flash and little substance, gameplay-wise.

Sounds like they should have put $80 price tag on the game. It was worth it.

Anecdotes are one thing, but the picture is clear when you look at inflation-adjusted trends: https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/23/the-cost-of-games/ The development cost for games, especially AAA titles, has in fact risen significantly.

Given the sacrifices that developers and especially artists have to undergo to work in the industry, I have absolutely no problem with saying that video games should monetize as much as they can, to ensure that the crew can continue to make a decent living.

Its worth keeping in mind that typically those huge budget games spend approx half of their budget on marketing.

For example, Red Dead Redemption 2's budget was US$ 70–240 million on development and a further 200–300 million on marketing: https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/31/red-dead-redemption-2-cou...

> Given the sacrifices that developers and especially artists have to undergo to work in the industry, I have absolutely no problem with saying that video games should monetize as much as they can, to ensure that the crew can continue to make a decent living.

If the money actually went to the developers, I'd agree, but largely it doesn't. It goes to the executives. Bobby Kotick got a US$200 million bonus while at the same time laying off staff. The money made by big budget AAA titles largely doesn't go to the developers who have to undergo those sacrifices, it goes to already rich executives who don't need it and make no sacrifices.

Thank God for you.

Unfortunately you're both right, and companies are making huge profits at the expense of their employees typically measured in time and mental health.

And money. Lets not forget the trend of paying their top executives big bonuses while laying off the staff.

For example: https://www.ign.com/articles/activision-blizzard-has-reporte... (yes, yes, that bonus was part of a contract from 5 years ago, but its still in rather bad taste to pay out hundreds of millions while laying off a load of staff)