Inflation Pet Peeve
Feb. 22nd, 2018 05:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owsf2000So I started watching another of the CU Podcasts recently where Pat and Ian talk about the pricing of video games and whether games "Should cost 60 dollars or not". (For the record, a complete game hasn't been 60 dollars for years but they're just talking about the base game. ie: What -use- to be the complete game up until game publishers gained the ability to hack apart their game to sell piece-wise, rush before it's done to patch later, etc etc.)
I had to stop watching it as soon as I heard Pat mention "Oh but we never really talk about inflation".
In other words he jumped into that broken argument of "Oh 60 dollars from 20 years ago was a lot more than 60 dollars today!"
That may be technically true. But at the same time calculate what you were making as a salary back in those days and you'll realize that you were making a hell of a lot more money back then than you're making today, once you convert those old dollars into today's dollars.
And that's the part that everyone trying to use inflation to justify things being "cheaper" today get it wrong. They always leave that part out, giving an incorrect assessment of the issue.
Either way, no, I don't agree that inflation would justify DLC - assuming that's what Pat would have went on to say. Furthermore, saying that these triple A games have hollywood movie budgets also doesn't justify skyrocketing costs in the end product, or scummy tactics being attached to them in the way of season passes (the rest of the game), loot boxes (gambling machines), or straight up microtransactions (because why not sucker.)
Being a game company doesn't free you from the burden of trying to budget properly. Something they always fail to do - as shown by how they'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars just on marketing to brainwash people into buying a game that's now underfunded by a few hundred million dollars.
These companies have stockholders. Stockholders require the company to do better each year than the previous year. That's all that matters, and that's why all this shit happens. So the only ways to increase those profit margins each year fall into a few groups:
1. Make more games per year.
2. Get more players playing their games each year (And thus, in theory paying for them.)
3. Squeeze out every last penny out of a gamer on just a couple games.
Guess which of these 3 is the easiest, cost-efficient, way to boost profits.
#1 requires full development crews hired.
#2 requires either a lot more marketing, a lot more lobbying to make gaming attractive to the current non-gamers who are bred to see it as either evil or geeky, or egads lower the launch price of the game and hope you get a lot more people buying the game.
#3 Requires selling incomplete games before their complete, cutting out parts to use as pre-order bribes, cutting out more parts to sell as DLC either as itself or as part of an expensive "expansion pack", addition of consumable dlc that has to be bought repeatedly, and/or making the entire DLC purchases a case of random luck (purchased luck of course. ie: lootbox schemes)
We already know what path the industry chose.
I had to stop watching it as soon as I heard Pat mention "Oh but we never really talk about inflation".
In other words he jumped into that broken argument of "Oh 60 dollars from 20 years ago was a lot more than 60 dollars today!"
That may be technically true. But at the same time calculate what you were making as a salary back in those days and you'll realize that you were making a hell of a lot more money back then than you're making today, once you convert those old dollars into today's dollars.
And that's the part that everyone trying to use inflation to justify things being "cheaper" today get it wrong. They always leave that part out, giving an incorrect assessment of the issue.
Either way, no, I don't agree that inflation would justify DLC - assuming that's what Pat would have went on to say. Furthermore, saying that these triple A games have hollywood movie budgets also doesn't justify skyrocketing costs in the end product, or scummy tactics being attached to them in the way of season passes (the rest of the game), loot boxes (gambling machines), or straight up microtransactions (because why not sucker.)
Being a game company doesn't free you from the burden of trying to budget properly. Something they always fail to do - as shown by how they'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars just on marketing to brainwash people into buying a game that's now underfunded by a few hundred million dollars.
These companies have stockholders. Stockholders require the company to do better each year than the previous year. That's all that matters, and that's why all this shit happens. So the only ways to increase those profit margins each year fall into a few groups:
1. Make more games per year.
2. Get more players playing their games each year (And thus, in theory paying for them.)
3. Squeeze out every last penny out of a gamer on just a couple games.
Guess which of these 3 is the easiest, cost-efficient, way to boost profits.
#1 requires full development crews hired.
#2 requires either a lot more marketing, a lot more lobbying to make gaming attractive to the current non-gamers who are bred to see it as either evil or geeky, or egads lower the launch price of the game and hope you get a lot more people buying the game.
#3 Requires selling incomplete games before their complete, cutting out parts to use as pre-order bribes, cutting out more parts to sell as DLC either as itself or as part of an expensive "expansion pack", addition of consumable dlc that has to be bought repeatedly, and/or making the entire DLC purchases a case of random luck (purchased luck of course. ie: lootbox schemes)
We already know what path the industry chose.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-22 03:18 pm (UTC)And as you say, that $60 is no longer for the full, finished, polished game like it once was 20 years ago. So yeah, I fully agree with at least the premise, as stated by Pat, of Jim Sterling's video (which I haven't actually watched myself, because listening to Jim Sterling talk is, for me, only slightly less terrible than fingernails on chalkboard) that modern AAA games should absolutely not cost $60. Maybe, maybe the game-of-the-year/ultimate/collector's/complete editions of these games, which contain all the various DLC for no extra cost (and no extra download, but fat fucking chance getting even that much these days)... maybe those can get away with being $60, instead of double or triple or quadruple that, like they typically are these days, but not the base-level, sans DLC, chopped up horseshit versions of the game. Hell the fuck no.
I kept watching, because I was hoping that Ian would chime in to be the voice of reason, as is often the case, countering this dumb bullshit that Pat brought up, but this time, he failed just as hard as Pat did, if not even harder. Ian uses the original SNES Mario Kart as an example, but again, Mario Kart was a full fucking game. No DLC, no microtransactions, no season passes, no loot boxes, none of that fucking bullshit. In fact, Ian went even further into lala land by saying that video game companies should just straight up start charging even more for their games (though he meant for the "full" games, not the base-level, chopped up shit). Well, guess what. They already goddamn do that. And if they did start charging more, it would be for the base-level chopped up shit, and then, of course, the prices on the "complete" editions of these games would also go up to two to three to four times higher than that.
Ian did, at least, say that he wished they'd stop selling games piecemeal, but then said he'd be okay with buying "full" games for way more than $60. And as Pat said, that piecemeal dumbshit is pretty much here to stay, regardless of pricing, whether we like it or not. It's one of the few things they said in this video that I grudgingly agree with, even though I fucking hate it, and even though they seemed far more okay with it than I am.
They say at the end the banal chestnut of "if you don't like it, don't buy it." Which is why I fucking don't buy it. There are still plenty of (truly) indie game developers out there who are releasing plenty of excellent quality games (which I would say rival any given AAA game any day of the week, even if they may not have A-list celebrities voicing in them or photo-realistic graphics or flawless Newtonian physics or Skynet levels of AI or whatever other unnecessary shit) and are charging a reasonable $5-$20 for their games, such that, no, I don't have to and won't pay $100-plus (or even $60) for an amazing experience. As for me, I think the last big AAA title I bought was probably Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, and I sure as fuck didn't pay $60 for that. I think I got it as part of a Humble Bundle for which I paid maybe $12-$15, or else I paid maybe $5-$10 on a Steam sale for it, I can't recall which at the moment, and it doesn't much matter, either way. And the only reason I bothered with even that much is because the Dark Arisen version contained all of the DLC at no extra cost. Someone can call me a villain or an asshole if they want for that, but I don't fucking care. If that game still cost $60, I would not be playing it today, same as any other so-called AAA game that costs that much, and that's a stone cold fact. And if I have to wait five or ten or more years for the currently $60-plus games to reduce their prices to a more reasonable level, then so fucking be it. I have plenty of other stuff (too much stuff, to be completely honest) to play in the meantime.
At the very end, Pat says rather snarkily "Let's be reasonable here. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water, uh, there." No, in this case, I say to hell with the baby and the bathwater. Put that baby on a fucking spit and roast it until it's charcoal for all I fucking care, at this point. I'm still wishing and hoping for the utter crash of the bloated modern video game industry, even though that seems less and less likely to ever happen as time goes on.