gaming Are big budget games, killing the video game industry?

[Mesme Rize 15,685]

We have certainly come a long way, from the bleeps and small square pixels that resemble people, from the Atari 2600. All the way to large worlds with fully detailed landscapes and people on the PS4, XBONE, PC, etc. The question is though, is that really such a good thing.

 

Here is a graphic i found, that was from 2005:

 

 

If we go now to the present day, we speak of even bigger numbers here. GTA V costed 265 Million dollars, Destiny costed 500 million dollars. We go towards numbers here, that even go beyond the numbers of the most expansive hollywood movies of all time. Back in the 16 bit era, great classics that are still played today, just costed below 1 million dollars? Where is this ending?

 

How long will it take, until video games will cost even 100 dollars, not including the millions of DLC that comes with it? If this goes on in the next couple of years, only the biggest publishers will survive. Destiny is already a big indicator, which is frightning, considering Destiny is incredibly mediocre.

 

What will happen when we will get a 1 billion dollar budget game? The companies sure as hell won't sell it for just 60 dollars. They will probably charge it for 200 dollars and then you will probably just get a half decent experience, because you don't have the DLC.

 

 

What do you think? Will the video game industry just crash under this money pressure, or am i just too negative?

[Hazard Time 1,127]

Honestly, I don't think what you said will come to pass for a long, long time.  Game companies can only charge however much their consumers are willing to pay.  Two hundred dollars for a game is incredibly ludicrous, and while there have been games that have sold for similar amounts (like Action 52, which boasted 52 buggy, unfinished, and overall mediocre arcade games), nobody I know believes that a game in this day and age has any right to be above $100.  Collector's or Premium editions are a joke and a literal waste of money, especially with games like EA's Battlefront.  Before you can sell a game for that price, you have to move the Overton Window forward.  Back in the mid 2000's, a AAA game was only $50.  When Halo 3 came out, Microsoft and Bungie took advantage of the hype surrounding it (even though it was obvious they were going to make more games) and charged $60 (or was it $70?) for it on release.  I remember seeing that at Gamestop and thinking "WHAT THE HELL?! THEY EXPECT ME TO PAY THAT MUCH FOR THAT?!", but then it caught on.  We became used to the idea that a AAA game is worth $60, and it's only a matter of time before the base price moves up another $10, and another, and another, until, many years in the future, we WILL have a AAA game selling for $200 on release, and consumers will only be slightly annoyed.

 

To prevent this, the obvious answer is to vote with our wallets.  If a game is selling for $60 but it contains recycled assets and mechanics, barely a few hours of single-player content, and obvious bugs and exploits that should never have been in the game...

 

Well, in the end, it's your choice to buy it.  I hate the Call of Duty franchise for what it's come to represent in the gaming industry, but in the end, if you find it fun, who am I to judge you for buying Infinite Warfare with the cash you earned?  At the end of the day, my advice is thus:

 

Ignore the hype and wait for user reviews; that's the only way to be sure that the game is worth buying, because 90% of the time, any game footage released prior to the full release of the game will be heavily censored to drum up hype among the intended consumer base.  Do your research, and don't throw your money at any game that SEEMS good.  Shop smart, and don't become the mindless consumer that video game execs take you for.

Edited July 14, 2016 by Hazard Time

[King 5,625]

Speaking as someone who studies games development in uni I think a lot of the fear isn't really founded at this stage. Just like the movie industry, the cost for new productions starts small and begins to rise as more complex and longer development phases start to become common. Over time however, this will stabilise. That doesn't mean you won't get games with a budget of 500 million +, it just means that the majority of AAA games will have a similar price range.

 

On the flip side of big budget productions though, you get the smaller indi scene like the one we've seen explode since 2008/2009, the same thing happened/is happening in the movie industry with a lot of low budget films being made. Of course with all this said, that doesn't mean the retail price of games won't rise because there's every chance that it will.

 

We don't have to worry about the price of games rising to $200USD + for a very long time, if at all. The thing that's of more immediate concern is micro-transactions, the preorder system and DLC pricing. As games begin to cost more, companies seek to make more money without charging you more for the base game (this doesn't include the 'digital deluxe' versions that usually come out in tandem with the default package). We've already seen a huge increase in games with micro-transactions and such.

 

tl;dr: the industry has a few hiccups to sort out but overall we don't have to worry about the price skyrocketing for new games.

[Shanks 10,816]

This is unsustainable and is one of the reasons why another crash like the 83 gaming crash is likely. Prices will stabilize as developers will eventually have no choice but to try to become more efficient and lower costs, but how this will happen is a bit uncertain at this point. It is very unlikely that we will see skyrocketing prices on game, at least no directly but what we will likely see more of and we are already seeing is increasing reliance on DLC and other micro transactions. A lot of gamers criticize micro transactions yet many gamers still buy them meaning they bear some of the responsibility in this as well.

[weesh 690]

This is unsustainable and is one of the reasons why another crash like the 83 gaming crash is likely.

 

A crash on the level of the 80's isn't ever going to happen again.  the market has diversified dramatically, from indie to triple AAA, and from hardcore gamers to grandmas playing candy crush.  even if the triple AAA part of the industry over-reaches and over-spends, there are a ton of other parts of the industry that will skate along just fine.  

 

Similarly, to answer the OP's question, a few big developers can't kill the industry.  They can probably implode on themselves, but the idea that this will cause a chain reaction that takes down everyone seems a bit far fetched.  

[Kyoshi Frost Wolf 41,684]

AAA games are not killing the industry, because they are slowly becoming the minority. Smaller, more indie titles are becoming the popular thing these days and that is most likely as a direct result of what that graph shows. So to me that creates a balance. Bigger, more expensive AAA titles can still exist while smaller teams can experiment with less costly ventures.

[ChikaChan 7,324]

I think so yep,since they kept releasing unfinished AAA games with microtransaction now these days o~o

[idunnomaybe 344]

Speaking as someone who studies games development in uni

Speaking as some one who briefly worked in the game development industry... people wont touch you unless you have a degree in computer engineering and have a portfolio of working on mods and making assets from scratch gave dev degrees are good for places like IGN and Rooster Teeth 

 

not trying to be a dick i just REALLY hate game dev degrees because they blatantly lie that it will get you a job in the industry 

[Corgis 574]

I think people will just stop buying the big game titles after a while if they start to cost $100+ after a while.  Indi games are still out there and only cost a fraction of the price.  Right now I only buy games from pre 2010 or indi games just because the major AAA titles are just too expensive now.