That said, I'm not personally a fan of the latest generation having price increases. I went from buying games when they came out to just waiting until the games are half off and only buying games on release when there's a vital story I don't want to have spoiled for me. But 90% of my purchases are now only when the game is 50% off or more.
The profits these publishers have recorded in last years are staggering - raising game prices is pure fleecing.
My curiosity is that there's some normalized change in game pricing, but it's really dependent on both inflation and increased size of gaming market.
Since unit costs are so low for digital goods, if you have +5% inflation over a period and +15% gamers, the price of AAA games technically should have gone down to maintain profits. (Assuming you hold development costs static, which isn't true but simplifies the problem)
I'm not sure what that inflation-TAM number would be. Maybe games are getting "more profitable" (at the same price point), maybe less.
You're right that more sales could mean lower prices, but I don't know the numbers. I would not have assumed CoD is so much more popular now than 10 years ago.
Things cyberpunk, BF 2042 in the same genre etc.
If it doesn't interest you why are you even in this thread being so unnecessarily hostile about it.
Warzone was an immensely popular free-to-play Battle Royale game, released at exactly the right time during the pandemic to catch the wave of isolated people looking for new, online group activities. In contrast to other Battle Royale games, it was much faster-paced and forgiving, with more emphasis on fun gunplay than realism or "tactics."
Last November, they released Warzone 2, while simultaneously effectively shutting down the original Warzone. And it's a complete 180 from the original. The game is much more like a conventional BR... extremely slow paced and "tactical," and much more difficult to recover from an early mistake. And while it's hard to point to any one piece of data, the overwhelming sense in the community is that the game is not performing well; viewers on Twitch have fallen off massively since the release, and players are down massively since release. Again, I don't want to say "the game is in trouble," but it's telling that the developers are being bizarrely forthcoming in their "here is what we're going to change, we promise" posts, compared to how they handled the original Warzone. And anecdotally, my group of ~8 people that used to play Warzone every few days all abandoned WZ2 within the first week or two.
And I continue to be absolutely perplexed by their decision. Their game was wildly successful, differentiated itself from other BRs for its gameplay, and got incredibly lucky with their pandemic timing. Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors??
If you’re into indie games, where a new game can challenge what a genre even means, then naturally Warzone will seem unoriginal. That’s a totally fair opinion, and I also prefer indie games. But that’s less of a critique than you simply not enjoying AAA games. Would you call Elden Ring uninspired because it’s just Breath of the Wild + Dark Souls?
On the other hand, there’s a class of games which they release annually, with each game being obviously just a reskin of the previous iteration, with perhaps negligible gameplay changes. FIFA is the most notorious offender here, with some releases updating nothing but player rosters, for a full sticker price. And mainline COD largely falls into that bucket… they just rehash the same gameplay while cycling through different settings (“it’s been a few years, let’s do WW2 again”).
The point I was trying to make is, WZ2 is not that latter category. The innovation may be small compared to indies, but the changes to pacing and gameplay from WZ->WZ2 were fairly radical (and, uh, disastrous), so it’s interesting to glean what we can about wtf they’re thinking and planning.
They wouldn't be the first development team to lose the "What are we already doing right?" core features in the "What aren't we doing?" sprint.
In my opinion, the only reason Warzone was/is popular was because it is the COD version of Battle Royale, that most gamers wanted to see since many of us played COD growing up.
I found it okay, but it felt like a rehashed COD on a larger map.
I am a Fortnite fanboy since its inception and what keeps me around is the constant change of the map either throughout the seasons or the complete map changes every chapter. Warzone suffers because it becomes too repetitive.
Activision only succeeds due to size and inertia. Big budgets, lots of artists, name recognition.
I like when obscure or indie gaming stuff shows up on this site, because there's usually something interesting to learn about it or discuss around it. Call of Duty number 30 and its set of completely uninspired additions are not the least bit interesting.