Comment on For Warhorse's 15th birthday, we chatted with its co-founder about the demand for 'grown-up' RPGs, AI, why games are too cheap, and his role in the collapse of communism

rollerbang@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Apparently there are lots of studies and calculations that indeed suggest games are overall way too cheap for the industry to be sustainable. I hear it from insiders again and again. From small indie studios to industry giants.

  And many point their fingers at platforms like Steam to be the culprits. Steam in particular is pretty unpopular among developers overall. Looking at how competitive the market is and how many devs are pushed into burnouts in just a single production I tend to believe them. The current model does not seem to be sustainable for studios of any size.

  That said, I think a lot of studios could try scaling down their productions too because I hear about feature creep from the same insiders just as much. They really need better planning.

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  • SmoothOperator@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Apparently there are lots of studies and calculations that indeed suggest games are overall way too cheap for the industry to be sustainable

    That’s really interesting. I guess it’s one of the few really competitive markets for digital goods in the world.

    Do you have a link to one of these studies?

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• fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Market size can’t be valued in vacuum without considering market share. Sure, there’s a looot more people that can buy your game, but the attention time of those people is fine and the market is oversaturated with games.

  Groceries have doubled in price in the last 5 years, game prices have not. I’m not saying they should, I’m giving context. The largest cost of a game production is usually salaries, by far, and those need to keep increasing, which lowers margins, and that then only keeps being sustainable if sales increase, which honestly I don’t see it anymore.

  Not every souls player will buy the next non from soft souls like because there are so many already.

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• ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  As per the article, the signs we’re seeing are that the market size has stopped growing, which is why something else has to give. Klima hopes that prices will be permitted to increase post GTA6 (I certainly don’t think so), but the situation is bleak for the industry if they can’t. Mathematically, executive bonuses are just not moving the needle, but cost of living in certain parts of the world is.

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  • rollerbang@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Bonuses certainly aren’t meaningless. CEOs (or at least one case) are trying to fake their employees out of bonuses. Billion value acquisitions aren’t helping either, these values all have to be recouped.

    If market has stopped growing, it may also have to do with those living cost crisis.

    Cash gravs from major companies aren’t working either (Sony and others). Those 400m holes again need to be recouped.

    In the end I seriously hope that gamers won’t just swallow the expected increases. I know for a fact that I won’t. There’s plenty to play, I can wait years for the one game I wish for.

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      They’re not meaningless, but at a macro level, there are much bigger fish to fry. I know it’s ridiculous to see one person make tens of millions of dollars, but most of that is stock, and that person is typically responsible for multiple large teams. Even if it was all cash, a $10M bonus would instead pay for about 80 people in the US for one year, and it’s quite typical for a AAA game to have teams of hundreds. Meanwhile, your money will go twice as far in Asia or parts of Europe.

      From what we’ve seen from other recent efforts to raise game prices, I don’t think we’re about to see one after Grand Theft Auto. The market expanded for years, in part, because prices rose so slowly relative to inflation. Sure, they found tens of thousands of people willing to pay $70 for an N64 game, but you might get hundreds of thousands willing to pay $40 for the equivalent game today. I think raising the price further at this point is going to end up cutting out the customer that this market expanded to, which is why prices aren’t going to go up, generally.

      But then that’s still very bad news for the industry. One of the ways studios will survive in high cost of living areas is to scope their games down, but that’s going to make it tougher to compete with low cost of living areas and will result in job losses any way you slice it.

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      • rollerbang@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Sure, but that’s just natural in economy. There’s growth and then there’s decline. Constant development of games that are too large is not beneficial to anyone but few that actually have the time to play them. It will definitely be interesting to observe how this will play out.

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  • BigPotato@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Klima hopes prices go up, Yacht Club Games puts out $20 games.

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yacht Club suffered layoffs trying to put a bow on that $20 game, and they were already way smaller than Warhorse making a much smaller game.

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• Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s a difficult thing to admit, but I do think a change to game prices might incentivize more singleplayer games. If Sony makes a multimillion dollar adventure, they may not win out from a large number of sales as they’d like given the cost. It’s much easier to start with a $0 price tag and nickle and dime people.

  But, that’s impossible to change until minimum wages go way up - put more people out of the mode of struggling to survive, and give them money they can safely spend on luxuries.

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