You are getting down voted but that is what most players care about it. It's the reason COD and every 2K or sports game gets worse every year. It's the reason Pokemon somehow continues to become more and more souless. It's the reason companies can put out shit and still print money.
Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere.
When you pay your devs 50k per year while requiring 60-80hr work weeks, experienced devs aren't going to apply. Young, inexperienced devs fill the roles instead and make junior dev mistakes all over the place.
Once you move to subscription models, you can update games rather than constantly hype the next version. You have more consistent revenue streams and can give incentives to your devs to stick around. Valve doesn't quite have a subscription model (they make their money from their store), but does show how long-term devs working on the same game for many years gives excellent results.
As much as I dislike the idea of not owning games, I suspect it is the future, but the overall quality will go up as a result.
>Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere.
Except the number of people with the skills to make games has increased (which depresses gamedev salaries), the tooling to make and publish games has become cheaper (or outright free with tools and engines like Blender, Krita, and Godot), and the overhead costs of physically publishing and distributing a game have been largely eliminated by digital publishing. To top it all off, the amount of competition in gaming has increased, which drives down prices. If anything, games should be even cheaper. And in the indie scene they usually are
Look at modern games. They are almost all bug-ridden until the second DLC (if ever) which is probably just base content they moved out to pad the cost. By that point, you've spent $120 on the game anyway.
As they say: Cheap, fast, and good -- pick two.
With a larger talent pool and all the hard problems already solved, you'd expect games to INCREASE in quality with fewer bugs and issues. If they threw cheap out the window and were charging $200, they could hire and retain experienced talent who would make far fewer mistakes and the quality would increase dramatically.
EDIT: To address number of people further, lets say there are 100x more talent now than in 1993. If 5 people developed Doom and 500 people are needed for a modern AAA title, then the effective supply to demand ratio hasn't changed.
You are making a case for why games have gotten worse based on money? Video game comapnies make far more money now than they ever have in the future. The market is also larger than its ever been.
If we’re comparing apples to apples, you’d expect a 2.5D platform from an indie developer with only a handful of people to cost $60.
Speaking of markets, doom 1 sold 4M copies. The best selling hardcore gamer game is grand theft auto V with 155M copies sold.
That’s a bit less than 40x the number of sales for doom (next best is red dead redemption 2 at 39M or 10x). 9 people in total developed doom. 1,000 people worked in GTA-V. They also worked many more years.
That’s over 100x more people and probably 500x the total development time for just 40x the sales. If you look into red dead’s numbers, I’m positive they look far worse than that.
GTA-V would need to cost $300+ to match the profit margins of doom if people were getting paid the same. Of course, they get paid peanuts for the “privilege” of working on some megacorp’s game.
You are comparing initial retail sale values and not accounting for major money makers for gaming comapanies, virtual currency and micro transactions. Doom does have whales. GTAV has people who have spent thousands+ on GTAV online.
This is the differance. This is why so many companies pump games full of microtransactions. They don't care about the average player spending 60 dollars on the game. They want the 1 in 100 or 1000 or 10000 whales who spend 2500 to 50K on the game.
Im not an expert in game development nor really a gamer but this still seems like a poor argument
> Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today)
Again not my area. So these are observations:
> there is a way bigger market than 1993
> there are different business models now
> gaming engines are widely developed
> software tooling has vastly improved
Sure things like server/infrastructure cost now must be accounted for. I just dont think its that fair of a comparison. Doom was a packaged AAA title for $60. You can definitely produce a game for that price today and effectively the price is like $100 after online and dlc and all this other junk.
Firstly, I'm not concerned with being downvoted. Reminding people of the reality we actually live in isn't always popular. People enjoy being outraged and love to hate on big companies like Activision, yet they will and do continue to buy their products in massive numbers. There is a disconnect between what the public says and what they actually do.
Very certainly not. Some people are probably perverts as you indicate. Others are just outraged legitimately, making it a statement and acting accordingly.
So, no, some people will not accept being part of it.
> People ... yet they will and do continue to buy
You are fighting a strawman if you focus on those few or many that pollute the market. And you seem to be supporting both a polluted market and its supporters.
I think this is the problem with growing access to a global audience(market). It doesn't matter if the product sucks if the marketing spend and reach is enough that you get X% of that global pie and make good money.
And it's an easy sell for investors too: release in a couple more countries and 'hey, sales doubled, everyone loves it!!'
There's plenty of indie quality out there, but it's immensely drowned out by the top end in marketing, influencing and availability.
Pretty sure then as a tax paying citizen that I'm responsible for drone assassinations etc., so by comparison the entire Blizzard drama would be pretty low on the priority list by that logic.
It’s low, sure, but also much easier to do: you’re legally required to pay taxes and political change takes years, but you can simply choose to save money.
and according to your interpretation stealing a car seems "not a big deal" because it comes after a murder. (They are disconnected events, so to relate them is just a mental perspective - their gravity is independent. There is no «priority» forgiving your actions, it is no excuse).
I'm not even talking about the politics. Just the shit games with the crappy player-hostile business models.
Blizzard used to make awesome games that were fun to play. They came up with some of the most enduring game franchises, and their games are still classics. Now, not so much. Actually, not at all. It's all just repetitive shite based on the same old tired universes.
You could always just wait. I'm only now working my way through the PS3 library and I could look up which games were considered the best on that platform, each title was ~$10 on average, that price often included a bunch of DLC, and every game is as patched as it's ever going to be. I'm playing Uncharted 3 right now which I picked up for $4. The box says that it includes $45 worth of DLC and on install it downloaded over 500MB of patches (which the internet tells me were very badly needed). I get all the fun and none of the frustration at a tiny fraction of the price
Once I run out of PS3 games I'll pick up a PS5 and work through the PS4 games that were actually worth it.
Once upon a time we got things called 'demo discs' with our gaming mags that had a taste of the games coming out soon so we could inform ourselves.
It's nice to see lately that Steam is providing more demos, which should have been a thing all along, but the logic that demos is bad (and how they disappeared largely some time ago) is only a benefit for those wanting to shovel crap out.
