With the modern age it has become something of a hallmark for games to suddenly decide they're worth the $70 price tag. It's something more of a American problem I've noticed, as many English games that are sold locally retain their £60 tag when brand new, but digitally purchased AAA games do tend to be 69.99- which is a lot more than $70 when we take conversion into account! But whereas studios are determined to enforce that this is simply the way things have to be whilst they pose shirtless, bulging nanomachine-fuelled muscles glistening above an upturned Metal Gear- I must take my hat off to the consumers who are, for perhaps the first time ever, voting with their wallets entirely unprompted. It seems that when you ask the average consumer to throw up an extra tenner, in the middle of a global recession where people can't even afford to pay off their weekly shopping bills, suddenly the luxuries in life become the least of your concerns. Meaning- those games just get brushed past.
Now I'm not saying that there's been some massive exodus away from the recent released AAA market, these games are still selling enough to be profitable- but they're also losing enough of those week one interest purchases by having a price tag just large enough to trigger the absolute worst thing you can in a potential customer- pause. The very heart of sales marketing, for those lucky enough never to have been employed in the field (I envy your innocence) is to become the mind of the consumer. You speak to them as though you're on their side, put into their mind the feelings they should have, voice then undermine their considerations and guide them to the purchase before they ever know what happened. The very second you allow for free thought, independent consideration, the deal wavers and sense breaks through. People start asking if they really want to spend that sort of money on a new game, or just replay Red Dead Redemption 2 again. (Which I have been doing recently by the way, it's still great.)
None of this is to mention that two of the biggest break out success stories of this year has been, lo and behold, much cheaper games fronted by smaller studios who have burst out of their niche by being just so darn accessible to everyone at a $20 price tag! Palworld and Helldivers 2 are the bells of the ball that no one has to really think about picking up because they're just such easy scores. Who doesn't want to rock around online with their friends in this game that costs a spare note in your wallet? It makes for an easy recommendation, which makes for an easy community to build, which makes for an easy grass routes word of mouth movement, which makes for a potential sensation. If this is the direction that the game hype audience is going, then by all means- I'm all for it!
Of course, the talk about 'rising development costs' and the 'poor reduced costs of workers' has absolutely nothing to do with the price increase as I've been insisting all this time. $70 doesn't magically grant all the profit these companies were lacking to pay their staff properly and afford these games, these publishers were already juggling tens to sometimes hundreds of millions in profits and making a poor job dishing it out to staff and development- if they couldn't be trusted with less money, how is giving them more going to solve the problem? Why are we actually endorsing Reganomics in the games industry? The real truth behind the price tag is simple. The industry projections tell us that growth is stagnating, so these desperate fools are trying to skew their income to create the illusion of growing profits- hence the short-sighted and illogical firing of copious members of staff. Look forward to them wondering in a year or two why their future games are taking so much longer to make!
Now we have other leaders of the video game industry, like Saber Interactive, declaring that the $70 price point is just a phase that the industry will grow out of. That CEO believes the price point in unsustainable, and ultimately companies are going to need to shop around for ways to price cut in the development process if they want to have a chance at building themselves back up again. Pricing themselves out of the market under a myth of 'Premium Pricing' just isn't going to end up lasting them as long as they pray it will. Sony may insist that their games are worth any penny, but what is that worth when Skull and Bones debuted for $70? A game that currently has 111 viewers on Twitch at this very moment- it launched a couple of months ago.
Reports are coming up claiming that bigger swathes of the currently gaming market are engaging with games that are up to seven years old rather than splurging out on newer titles. And sure, a lot of that is going to be your Counter Strike or League of Legends crowds, but there are going to be those Cyberpunk lovers who look at the market and see nothing really worth spending the money and significant time investment over! Personally I don't think I've played a single game released this year, although I have brought Infinite Wealth which I hope to get around to eventually, that's more the exception to the rule. If a diehard like me can't find himself capable of stomaching new releases, what does that say to your average hobbyist?
Again, we know this to be an aggressive course correction strategy, but there's an old analogy about medicine and bad cures I think might be pertinent to the discussion here. I just think it's telling that the most lauded and award strewn gaming developer of the 2020's so far, Larian, is going around lambasting the industry for the direction their going. Swen is calling out the short-sighted layoffs, the doomed to fail crunch cycles, the bottomless-pit content holes- and he's doing from the high horse of the company that did everything right, pleased it's audience and made absolute gang busters with a single player game that regularly sees upwards of 50,000 concurrent Steam players. Is there any higher a horse to preach from?
At the end of the day, to slightly alter a quote from Kanye West before he lost his mind, goddamit they're killing this sh**. And I don't mean that in the positive connotation! Promising developers are being forced out of the height of the industry, aspiring artists are being scared away, customers are being outpriced, and books are being all but cooked in a wild dash to record profits. And the big question mark hanging precariously over everyone, like the swinging Sword of Damocles specially enchanted with +5 vermin damage, is what happens this time next year? Who do you cut when there's no one left to cut? What prices do you hike when your consumers stop showing up at the door? And who do you blame when investors start seeing the leprechaun bucket emptying?
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