Oh! Also, music online is $1 a song. Yeah, I can pirate 100 songs and still spend a $1 and be counted in the positive section of your survey. Hell, even an album on iTunes is $10 and a CD is $15. It's much easier for someone to spend that kind of money rather than $60. And I know you'll want to come back with saying games should cost less, but games just cost too much money to make to justify a $15 or even a $30 price tag.
There's just no other way around that. AAA games cost a lot of money to make and they have to make the money back.
But anyways, here are some links for you from a quick Google search:
- The Cost of Movie Piracy in the US
- Software Piracy costs $34 billion dollars
- Music Piracy Costs Money, does fighting it cost more?
- How much did piracy hurt the Wolverine movie?
- Sims 3 downloaded nearly 200,000 times days before launch so we can assume that's about 125k copies not bought from one of your above links
As for the Sabateur, pretty tame is a long shot from a bad game. Sabateur may not be a game of the year contender, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game (getting a 73-75 at the moment so still a good game).
And Ensemble burned through A LOT of money. They made good games, but they also cost a SHITLOAD of money to make those good games.
And I'm not sure if these two points didn't sink in but I'll say them again:
- You cannot predict if a game will be good before it's made. At the very beginning of the project you have to set a budget and that budget isn't for a $15-30 game.
- Mirror's Edge would have sold more, but not nearly enough to make money at $30 new.
And do you think Blizzard spent less money with a small team for WoW?
El. Oh. El.
Blizzard spent a crap load of money with a huge team developing that art style. They were smart because they made something pleasing to look at that could run on most any somewhat modern computer. Blizzard cost more than most games cost to make and not just because it was an MMO.
As for making games bigger and badder (as in more bad ass), I've talked about this problem a lot mainly regarding Final Fantasy. Games set bars really high and if you don't hit that bar, you're going to be automatically seen as inferior unless you do something *really really* special. If a developer makes a game that isn't on par with whatever is new, the game will likely fail.
Essay Pro