Klima hopes prices go up, Yacht Club Games puts out $20 games.
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.
BigPotato@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s natural, but it’s going to be painful, and even though Klima benefits from the economic shift, he’s still concerned about it. I imagine a lot of institutional knowledge he acquired came from parts of the world where those jobs are rapidly disappearing.