[codelord]

Having worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$ fee. The math just doesn't work with video games. Video games take an army of developers and years of work to make. Game development is one of the hardest and worst paying professions in tech. Most people in the industry are there not for the money but because of their passion for the profession. Most games fail to pay for their production costs despite all the effort that goes into them. Companies who have had a few mega successes have to make enough money out of their popular titles to be able to pay for all the other titles that fail to pay for themselves. Please don't complain about video game prices!

[whstl]

When people say "greed of game developers" they're clearly not talking about rank-and-file devs, they're talking about development companies.

> An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost

Kind of ironic that you're saying that.

[SXX]

Majority of "development companies" are also shit poor and go bankrupt in after 1 or 2 projects even if they're moderately successful. Basically it's just hard to make profit in this industry and well over 90% of games never recouperate development costs.

Gamedev is just hard and there are very few exceptions like Epic or Rockstar that even get an option to become "greedy".

[whstl]

> are also shit poor and go bankrupt in after 1 or 2 projects even if they're moderately successful

Fair point, but those are clearly not the ones being pointed out as greedy by most people.

...except for maybe scrappy mobile companies that churn shitty microtransaction games looking for whales, but those are greedy indeed, and I doubt they have the sympathy of you or OP.

[SXX]

I personally not making mobile games or ones with microtransactions. Yet you can basically choose: either there will be microtransaction games for mobile or there will be none. This is not because of developers greed, but because it's the only way to monetize this audience. People voted with their wallet.

Microtransactions in PC games are there for the same reason - because you can't just go and sell your game for $25 if all of the competitors with similar production quality in last 5 years released for $15. Gamers simply wouldnt buy it and nobody care that with inflation $15 back then and $15 now are very different money.

Yet you can put microtransactions in the same $15 game and the same people will pay for them. And you'll reach desired $$$ of profit per copy sold. If everyone refused to pay for microtransactions and would spend more money on buying games without them instead there wouldn't be any microtransactions by now.

[cassianoleal]

> People voted with their wallet.

Not really. Most of these games are preying on weaknesses. These people are not voting with their wallets. They're being duped into giving away their mental health, and their wallet is taken away when they're not looking because of they're high in dopamine induced by images and sounds.

[rockskon]

That's about as sound an argument as saying people vote to go to casinos with their wallet.

While technically true, it omits a pretty damn significant detail behind the appeal.

[belorn]

Mostly this is not even about development companies, but the distribution platforms which are even further away from the game developer. It is the distribution platforms that makes policy and generally dictate the conditions on which a game is "sold".

The design and blame of microtransaction/gambling is more on the game developer, but even here we keep hearing stories on how such design is being pushed by the publisher (who act as investors) rather than the game developers.

The discussion is not about developers with passion for the profession.

[SXX]

Microtransactions exist because there are people who happily pay for them, but not spend similar amounts on high-quality pay-to-play single-payer games. It's just a market with supply and demand.

As about distribution platforms neither investors, publishers or game developers have any leverage against Valve, Microsoft or Sony. They just do whatever they want. So you're totally right here. These kind of monopolists can only be regulated by large political bodies like US or EU.

[yetihehe]

> Microtransactions exist because there are people who happily pay for them, but not spend similar amounts on high-quality pay-to-play single-payer games.

I can't speak for everyone, but I think this may be because with microtransactions you pay for additions to some product already known to be good (you tested it and you like it enough to buy some more), while with single-player games you typically have to pay upfront in hope it will be good. So risk-aversion sets in.

[glimshe]

This is like saying that drugs only exist because there are people who will happily pay for them, but not spend similar amounts on high quality coffee (although that's debatable!).

[glimshe]

To be fair, games often include an album (or more) worth of music...

[renegat0x0]

Why not both. Big tech is greedy. It also is a difficult domain. There are people and companies with passion. There are also big companies trying to milk every penny out of their customers, not caring about the product, and customers.

Take mobile games for example. I am not sure how much passion goes into majority of products in that space.

[aucisson_masque]

Counterpoint: Rockstar.

They take a long time to make games, but it's always very good quality.

At least enough for people to want to buy them over and over. Their game are not cheap but aren't more expensive than others triple A, yet they make a ton of money and Take 2 interactive stocks are doing great.

I'd say it's more that the gaming market is extremely concurrentiel, either you're very good at what you do, or you got load of money for marketing campaign, but if you got neither it's barely profitable. Increasing the price of your games in that case won't solve the issue, people would buy even less of your company's game.

[averageRoyalty]

> Most games fail to pay for their production costs despite all the effort that goes into them.

Yet for decades before the forced-online/micro-transaction ecosystem, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of games were made, sold for a singular price and the industry spun on.

Nobody is complaining about the price, the complaint is about the indentured nature of modern game sales and the ephemeral state of the online elements that most players don't want or care about.

[fx1994]

Doom and Doom 2... shareware, try it before buy it. And mod ability and open source later... id Software was great, shame they are gone now...

[rldjbpin]

can respect your perspective about pricing, but do not forget how we "buy" things now. it is just a virtual lease of unspecified duration in reality.

when physical ownership was possible, you could tend to have games that you can use for perpetuity. nowadays, you can lose access to what you buy for arbitrary reasons (see ubisoft example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40020961).

it then all boils down to similar grounds as mentioned for other media. all the dark patterns, forcing online connection for singleplayer experiences, and intrusive drm really downplays the labour of love argument for me. if it is all for passion for most game devs, they should not seek monetary expectations from their audience, who dedicate thousands of hours to play their works.

it should be well-understood that streaming is not ownership, and it has been an unsustainable business model. but so is owning anything digitally by paying up front. at least the arrangement is more apparent for the former. i personally work on things that can and is pirated, and having been on both sides, i would not demonize one.

[fourfour3]

This is from a gamer's PoV, not someone in the industry:

AAA Games are too expensive. Pricing for a retail product is not solely based on the cost to produce it, you have to price in what the market will bear and I think the games industry just isn't doing that. £60 or £70 for a base game (that often has microtransactions in it, or is often kinda incomplete with major plot still to be delivered via DLC, usually with £80 or £90 'premium' editions) is a lot of money for what are already stretched budgets. Most gamers I know wait for sales with significant discounts (50% or more) before they even consider buying AAA titles.

If you can't make a game affordable, then maybe the big AAA industry is making the wrong games, oversaturating the marketplace, or quality is suffering. Starfield's a good example - years of work to produce a game that is resoundingly 'meh'. You can't expect customers to shell out £60+ for 'meh', no matter how many people or resources were used to create it.

There's a lot of smaller 'indie' developers that do not have hundreds of staff that are making games that the market engages with and seems to love. Anecdotally I know my friend group generally prefers these titles to AAA. They frequently fill a significant percentage of the Steam Top Selling lists and these lists are sorted by revenue, not by number of sales. Their prices are more affordable (£10, £15, £20 or £30 are common price points) compared to AAA titles that are trying to cling to that £60 price point.

[majewsky]

> services like Spotify [...] allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$ fee. The math just doesn't work with video games.

Are you not describing XBox Game Pass?

[alexey-salmin]

Did you read the article? The problem is not the price, the problem is you can't buy and own stuff no matter what you pay.