I'd argue that AAA games already cost waaaay too low than they should. The price has stayed on $60 for two decades, while if you follow up the inflation, it should've been risen by a factor of two or three already. Basically, this discrepancy between the rising real costs and the fixed returns is why the companies are so desperate for all these ways to effectively increase the financial return without breaking the video game's holy cow of "AAA game costs $60 and not a single dollar more".
Inflation has remained steady actually.
The reason for the 60 dollar price tag... was because of the cost of manufacturing.
This cost as all but disappeared but they kept the price.
Not to mention DLC means that most 60 dollar games today cost far more then 60 dollars... and can be upwards of 100 dollars... For example "For Honor" already costs over 100 dollars.
They also need to pay their developers too, you know. That costs quite a lot, especially for big AAA studios who have like hundreds of people on their payroll. Or thousands. All of whom need to be paid every month by the means of selling like one-two games per year at best. Plus there's contractors, software costs, electricity costs, renting the office space costs...
It's not enough to just say "oh there's no manufacturing now so the prices should be almost nil".
Yeah, digitally distributed games are already massively overpriced at $60. There's no ancillary costs (beyond percentages taken by the sale platform), and as Neo said, most AAA games release for more than that, with $60 being the bare-bones pleb price. If $60 is underpriced, please explain to me how devs can release solid, substantial games and run an acceptable profit selling for $15-20.
Because those non-AAA developers have vastly lower expenses, due to not running AAA-scale studios with all of the associated costs. Of course, these games are of significantly lower quality as a result. Though, most of said quality drop is of visual variety - graphics. It's ok if you don't value that, but clearly millions of people do, else they wouldn't buy those AAA titles.
All of this shit about wanting paid mods, wanting overpriced games, probably wanting DRM too? That's what causes piracy. If the industry wasn't full of money-grubbing scumbags without a lick of common sense or basic decency, piracy would barely even be a thing, on the level of criminality from consumers in other sectors of business (that is, limited to the selfish sort who will steal just because they can).
Noooo. Piracy of video games is caused by the ability to multiply the copies of these video games for free or at least at a very very low price without any immediately apparent negative consequences or repercussions. And it was always very high in video game industry, even back when the games were priced "right" and have had to be manufactured.
As an anecdotal example, back in late 1990s - early 2000s, before DLCs even existed, there were entire markets selling pirated video games and all kinds of programs at low prices all over Russia, to the extent of outnumbering the number of legal stores. And I doubt that was a phenomenon unique to Russia, either.
EDIT: Incidentally, that neatly proves that the costs of manufacturing are not that much, since those pirates were able to turn profits by selling games at like $3 per CD-disk.
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Topic: Paid Mods -- Round 4: McGregor vs mAAAyweather (Read 102824 times)