| Intrinsic said: First off, smaller games like indies cost or should cost less to make than AAA games. And not every AAA game has a ridiculously big budget. Just look at games like Demon souls. The devs that have issues with steam sales, should simply release on consoles cause at least there its easier to control prices and theer is less price competition. I could go on, but really lack the patience to be more detailed. |
Yes, smaller games cost less, but they also are often funded out of the pocket of the guys making the game, who live like starving artists and spend their life savings on their dream. I can't imagine that it feels too good when someone looks at years of your life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars out of your pocket and says "10 dollars is too expensive, I'll buy it when it costs 1$".
Also, there are a lot of additional costs and hurdles when it comes to releasing games on consoles. You have to purchase a dev kit and get your game rated by the ESRB, both of which cost a non-insignificant amount of money. You also have to follow certain protocols that those consoles may make you adhere to and work within a specific box of boundaries and develop a game for a controller etc.
This isn't an issue to be brushed off...
I do think that more AAA games should operate under a lesser budget, but that is a whole other discussion...
| Intrinsic said: There is always more to these things than meets the eye. The industry isn't agrressively discounting everything cause they like selling games for less, they are discounting everything cause the base cost of games are higher than most people are wiling to spend. Meaning that even though some won't admit it, at $60 a pop they buy less games than they would at $40. |
The problem is that the industry is incentivizing and rewarding this penny pinching behaviour. It is conditioning gamers to be cheap bastards and rewarding them for doing so. This starts at games that are broken on release day (punishing early adopters) and ends at the ridiculous sales that condition gamers to wait.
The problem falls more on the low end (ie 10$ is too much, I'll wait until it is $1) but it affects everyone making games in the industry...
