The Malgorian Blog

So 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.