Teeqoz said:
We do know that game budgets have been increasing while game prices didn't. We do know that plenty of companies went bankrupt due to this during the 7th gen. Those seem like pretty good indicators of his point to me.. |
Ka-pi96 said:
We also know that the percentage of digital game sales (which means more money for publishers/devs) have been rising as well though. Plus I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of times companies lost money on games it's because their games just weren't good enough (or their budgets were far bigger than they needed to be) to attract enough sales. Increasing the price of those games probably would have lead to even fewer sales, thus they'd still be going bankrupt. |
Kap stole my thunder ;)
But yes. Digital sales are on the rise, and publishers take a larger cut of those sales (plus they spend less on overhead).
There's even evidence to suggest that game prices should be lowered from $60 -- that $60 is a high enough threshold to deter a consumer altogether, resulting in a missed sale. A lower price tag would make the product more desirable, and instead of 50 people paying $60 for a game, you might have 150 people pay $40.
The point is this: there are other solutions to this budget problem, apart from "pass the expense on to the end-user in the form of loot boxes and micro-transactions." If a game's budget is so high that it needs to sell five million copies at $60 (plus a few hundred thousand $30 season passes) then maybe the budget has gotten out of control.
If I'm a publisher looking at the equation Revenue - Expenses = Profit, why do I need to attack the Revenue side of things? Why not tackle the Expenses part? Many of those now defunct 7th gen publishers failed because they spent beyond their means and tried to wedge their talent and intellectual property into a "AAA" model. Look at something like Hellblade, which recouped costs in three months. The studio kept costs down by maintaining a small development team, applying for loans (now paid back), finding tax breaks in the UK, and using savings (which existed because of financial foresight).
I'm of the opinion that micro-transactions (mtx) and loot boxes are unnecessary to keep games like Call of Duty and Battlefront afloat -- that it's less about securing commercial viability and more about filling coffers as quickly and effortlessly as possible. But even if we assume a dire situation where EA and Activision would close shop without mtx revenue, why do we need to accept it? Especially when, in 2017, it's been proven that mtx economies are having deleterious effects on game systems -- to the point where the temporary removal of loot boxes in Battlefront II necessitated a dramatic rebalancing of the game's economy and progression system.
I am all for keeping the video game industry healthy and profitable. But I just can't defend invasive and predatory mtx practices as a way to maintain that profitability, especially when other, less exploitative solutions exist.
