BG3 was insanely cheap tho when accounting for scale. It was easily 2-3 games worth of content for the price of 1 game.
And the reason it was able to achieve the scale it did, was people bought the shit out of it on presale.
I looked and checked, I bought it almost 3 years before it released. Because act 1 was already playable, and already the length of a regular 2020 full release.
Despite “never pre-order a digital good” being sound advice 99.99999% of the time, the studio and IP and it being 20 some years since the last entry made it able to fund its own development.
Expecting anyone else to replicate that absolute perfect storm that allowed for BG3 is just going to lead to constant dissapointment.
I don’t think many people are expecting a GTA or BG3 amount of content. Yea those are outliers. The problem arises when your game is the same or greater in price as those. Your game better be one hell of a unique experience if you expect people to be satisfied with that price point.
It’s weirdly like socialism. A game like GTA knows they’ll sell a shit ton of copies for years after release. Likely on multiple console generations. All those customers subsidize each others portion of the development cost.
It’s economics of scale, the greater expected sales, the less profit margin the corporation will accept.
Niche games come with a niche tax. It’s not unique to gaming.
The price point most definitely isn’t static. Before we get into actual price points there’s DLC and whether or not that’s free or how it’s priced. But for actual games there’s an $80 price point, a $70 one, and a $60 one if you want to cherry pick and only discuss “console” games. There’s still plenty of games releasing at $40 or even $20 and those are *also released on consoles but likely don’t get physical releases. Don’t act like these companies don’t have leeway to set their own prices for what they produce.
It doesn’t need to be based on playtime. It’s honestly weird to base price exclusively on that. Quality isn’t easy to define for video games but if you explicitly say your game is lesser than a counterpart… maybe it’s not worth as much.
It’s just really hard when we’ve been for decades conditioned to largely see every game as priced at something like $60. It’s created a group of consumers who are incredibly price sensitive, but also likely to look on anything priced under $60 with a jaundiced eye.
Variation did begin to pick up once they started making indie games for consoles, but I was referring to games you could find on the shelves for an average home console. And I wasn’t going from memory, I was going off something I read a while back.
Since as long as I’ve been a gamer, the average MSRP of a game has been quite steady despite the fact that the purchasing power of that price tag has completely collapsed.
An average Atari 2600 game cost $39.99 but that’s closer to $170.70 in today’s money. A game for the PS4 had a sticker price 50% higher, but the actual value of that money is nearly ⅓ as much.
If you have better data than the article I’d love to hear of it. I hated how they referred to typical MSRP as the “average” price when it’s clearly the mode and not the mean.
My only point was that the price of these games has been at a certain level without regard for the drastic decline in the value of the dollar. Demand for games should be on the elastic side, so it’s weird that (most) prices have been so steady.
I think that was their point. If not, it’s a good one. The argument could be made that the devs think that their experience, though lesser than BG3 in scale is equal to it in overall value, when you add in quality of writing, worldbuilding, game mechanics, etc.
I think that’s unlikely to actually play out in practice, but it’s perfectly consistent with what they’re saying here.
By analogy, I could buy a setting book like Paizo’s Lost Omens: Shining Kingdoms. Or I could buy an adventure like Claws of the Tyrant, and there’s no particular reason to expect the former must cost more than the latter.
They’re partly trying to put a good spin on it, but I really appreciate that most of this article is trying to be transparent and open about the fact that their game just isn’t the same scale as BG3.
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So it’s priced accordingly right? Right?
BG3 was insanely cheap tho when accounting for scale. It was easily 2-3 games worth of content for the price of 1 game.
And the reason it was able to achieve the scale it did, was people bought the shit out of it on presale.
I looked and checked, I bought it almost 3 years before it released. Because act 1 was already playable, and already the length of a regular 2020 full release.
Despite “never pre-order a digital good” being sound advice 99.99999% of the time, the studio and IP and it being 20 some years since the last entry made it able to fund its own development.
Expecting anyone else to replicate that absolute perfect storm that allowed for BG3 is just going to lead to constant dissapointment.
I don’t think many people are expecting a GTA or BG3 amount of content. Yea those are outliers. The problem arises when your game is the same or greater in price as those. Your game better be one hell of a unique experience if you expect people to be satisfied with that price point.
That’s not how any of this works…
The price point is static, $X for a console game.
It’s weirdly like socialism. A game like GTA knows they’ll sell a shit ton of copies for years after release. Likely on multiple console generations. All those customers subsidize each others portion of the development cost.
It’s economics of scale, the greater expected sales, the less profit margin the corporation will accept.
Niche games come with a niche tax. It’s not unique to gaming.
The price point most definitely isn’t static. Before we get into actual price points there’s DLC and whether or not that’s free or how it’s priced. But for actual games there’s an $80 price point, a $70 one, and a $60 one if you want to cherry pick and only discuss “console” games. There’s still plenty of games releasing at $40 or even $20 and those are *also released on consoles but likely don’t get physical releases. Don’t act like these companies don’t have leeway to set their own prices for what they produce.
Yeah, if only games werent just released at a flat fixed 80 instead of how much playtime the average user can get out of them…
It doesn’t need to be based on playtime. It’s honestly weird to base price exclusively on that. Quality isn’t easy to define for video games but if you explicitly say your game is lesser than a counterpart… maybe it’s not worth as much.
It’s just really hard when we’ve been for decades conditioned to largely see every game as priced at something like $60. It’s created a group of consumers who are incredibly price sensitive, but also likely to look on anything priced under $60 with a jaundiced eye.
That’s recency bias. The PS3/360 era had lots of variation on price for games.
Variation did begin to pick up once they started making indie games for consoles, but I was referring to games you could find on the shelves for an average home console. And I wasn’t going from memory, I was going off something I read a while back.
https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/cost-of-gaming-since-1970s
Since as long as I’ve been a gamer, the average MSRP of a game has been quite steady despite the fact that the purchasing power of that price tag has completely collapsed.
An average Atari 2600 game cost $39.99 but that’s closer to $170.70 in today’s money. A game for the PS4 had a sticker price 50% higher, but the actual value of that money is nearly ⅓ as much.
If you have better data than the article I’d love to hear of it. I hated how they referred to typical MSRP as the “average” price when it’s clearly the mode and not the mean.
My only point was that the price of these games has been at a certain level without regard for the drastic decline in the value of the dollar. Demand for games should be on the elastic side, so it’s weird that (most) prices have been so steady.
I think that was their point. If not, it’s a good one. The argument could be made that the devs think that their experience, though lesser than BG3 in scale is equal to it in overall value, when you add in quality of writing, worldbuilding, game mechanics, etc.
I think that’s unlikely to actually play out in practice, but it’s perfectly consistent with what they’re saying here.
By analogy, I could buy a setting book like Paizo’s Lost Omens: Shining Kingdoms. Or I could buy an adventure like Claws of the Tyrant, and there’s no particular reason to expect the former must cost more than the latter.
They’re partly trying to put a good spin on it, but I really appreciate that most of this article is trying to be transparent and open about the fact that their game just isn’t the same scale as BG3.