Hello all,

My first post

Ok first, here in Europe AAA games are priced between €60 and €70. I don't know why some go the former and others the latter, occasionally a game is priced €50 like Final Fantasy 12 The Zodiac Age which is neither a AA price (€30 to €40) nor an indie price (Usually below €30). These prices are day one prices of course.

And I agree with those who say these prices (AAA Prices) are way too high and needing to go higher is BS. How could a game selling for example 5 million copies @60USD and thus effectively raking in 300.000.000 USD not be profitable? And that's not including the usual BS that goes along with it (DLC, Season Passes, In-game ads...) Oh and nobody mentioned the new kid in town, a rapidly spreading cancer known as LOOT BOXES.

I can't even begin to understand how people willingly pay such prices. Recently there was a game, I'm not sure which, some COD game maybe, selling a deluxe version on the PSN for €110, probably not including microtransactions. I'm like WOW, who can be stupid enough to pay such a price? If publishers dare put such tags on their products and people still buy it I'm like it's the people's fault for being stupid. But it seems people do pay such prices or such prices would not be applied.

As for me, I haven't paid 60 euros for a game in a very long time, I always wait for sales and honestly as sure as prices are too high on day one, they can get really good if one is patient and wait a few months to get the game. At the most I pay €30 for any AAA game but sometimes I get patient enough and pay around €20. Not only by then the game has had its bugs corrected but more often than not you get GOTY versions with all the DLC's included so for less than €30, you can get a pretty sweet deal, again if you are patient.

But they are far too few in number.

BotW is a masterpiece in game design, but for every game like it, we get ten or so mediocre releases.
And I get comparing any game to something of the quality of BotW is not really far, but we do need to try and move the medium forward.

It's not difficult to be profitable in the industry as long as you properly manage the development process and set you expectations accordingly. Big developers and publishers have only themselves to blame for the hole they've dug themselves into regarding this. They try to make every single game they release into a massive blockbuster success that sells millions of copies, and then they budget the game and its marketing on these massive expectations.

All this leads to are things like Dead Space 3, which EA tried to turn into their next Battlefield size franchise, completely failing to understand what people actually wanted from the series. It wasn't enough that Dead Space was a decent success that brought in a nice profit. They changed the franchise to a more action oriented fare, becoming just another 3rd person shooter largely indistinguishable from the rest of its kind, and then when it failed to attract the mass audience EA wanted the series was killed as a result.

What really needs changing is the design and marketing philosophies of big publishers. Its absolutely ridiculous that Square Enix can say they were disappointed by the Tomb Raider reboot selling "only" 3.4 million copies within four weeks of release, and then people saying that the problem is the price of games. The microtransactions, on-disc DLC, and the like are not a result of companies not making money, they just want to make more of it.

During the previous fiscal year (April 2015-March 2016) Square Enix, Ubisoft and EA all saw increased revenues and net income, and while Activision's was down, they still made $2.2 billion in revenue. Companies not making money is most definitely not the problem here.

I'd see that even a game that would be considered average/mediocre by some can be adored by others. Yes, we should try to get the best games possible, but as there are a wide variety of tastes, there are going to have to be different objectives suited to different audiences.

Just because Adam Sandler's movies are beloved by some, does not mean they move their medium forward.
Ubisoft is truly the Adam Sandler of the gaming industry.

I personally believe that each game should either:
Fully understand what itself is, and how to fill the required role (Nier: Automata does a bad job at this).
Push the medium in some form (Nier: Automata does a good job at this).

BotW does both, pretty much perfectly.

To me the can launch the game for whatever price they want, I would just not buy If I don't like the game enough to pay what they ask...
An alternative could be launch for 40 USD, sell even more and have more userbase to sell their DLC.
If they decide the price freely they can check what is the best price for their ROI.

It's good when the games can have the price adequated to the market reality.

Unless the marketing is run by monkeys the money expended there returns on the sales.

Well most things are mediocre, you can't have everything exceptional because that would make everything mediocre... mediocre means median, average. And the average on games have been consistently growing each gen.

But the games should at the very least try to push some aspect of the medium.
Nier: Automata is a good example of a mediocre game that pushes the gaming medium forward.

We don't need to be making the same games over and over again.

1. What is mediocre to you?

2. What constitutes as pushing the medium forward?

DLC and Microtransactions are the new 60$+ games. I paid 80$ for Zelda BotW...