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Video Games General

vyor said:
10 million floppies, 20 million CDs or DVDs, plus the packaging, plus distribution costs which BASSICALLY DON'T EXIST ANYMORE...

Yeah no, stop coping, you're fucking wrong.
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I still buy my Nintendo titles as physical copies, so distribution costs still exist. And they've most likely sold more physical copies of BOTW than they ever did for Zelda 1 (IIRC there was a 50/50 split in physical/digital copies at launch, can't find a figure for how many they actually sold, but if it remained 50/50, then they've sold about two and a half times as many physical copies of BOTW as they did Zelda 1), so that's bunk.

Zelda 1 was made by apparently a staff of 7 people, or at least that's the public credits for the game. Tears of the Kingdom has 1148 people listed as developers, plus another 260 in the "thanks to" category (which are AFAICT the people they borrowed from Monolithsoft, so they're actually devs too). There's two hundred times as many people needing a paycheck, and those paychecks will be three times as large per hour on average just for the inflation, so even if they all only worked about as many hours on average as the 7 people who made Zelda 1 (fat chance of that), that's 600 times as much money.

Meanwhile, they've increased the cost of games since that time by at the most, 30%, with no accounting for inflation.

Yeah, some corps just want to milk people. Nintendo aren't entirely exempt. But I haven't seen any microtransactions outside of the *one time* DLC pass for any of their first party titles that I've played, and their online service subscription which is entirely optional.
 
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Winchester said:
Yeah, some corps just want to milk people. Nintendo aren't entirely exempt. But I haven't seen any microtransactions outside of the *one time* DLC pass for any of their first party titles that I've played, and their online service subscription which is entirely optional.
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Nintendo just uses amiibos and amiibo-only content (of which BOTW1 had a decent amount) for that instead.
 
SwiftRosenthal said:
Nintendo just uses amiibos and amiibo-only content (of which BOTW1 had a decent amount) for that instead.
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Eh. None of the Amiibo only content was things you needed. I grabbed an Epona-lookalike horse with better stats in BOTW before I swapped to TotK, the armor sets were all the same stats as the ones already in the game (i.e. not all that useful, just cosmetic and a massive resource sink since they'd need upgrading); and the weapons were BOTW weapons, i.e. disposable.

Sure, it rankled a bit, but I could live without any of it easily.

Edit: And for those who did get the amiibos, how many other companies allow microtransactions to carry over between games? You don't need to buy new amiibos for every game to get their benefits, if you want them, they're a physical item.

I won't say Nintendo don't do shady things (their legal department is scary). but I'd call them better behaved than many others.
 
Winchester said:
Tears of the Kingdom has 1148 people listed as developers,
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Wow.

You'd never know it from the game itself.

Almost like... that many people didn't actually work on it or something? I mean a lot of those listed are QA and we damn well know they didn't do any work.

You want to know how many people Doom Eternal had working on it? 1,302 "devs"... except that the majority aren't actually devs. Producers, port devs, QA, random upper management(seriously the SVP of Bethesda is listed).

But ok, different genre, let's look at Elden Ring then. 1,629 developers, sounds like a lot! Then you actually go through and find that... no. No that many people didn't actually work on the game. In fact, only these people did:

Directors
Director
Co-Director
Programming Director
Gameplay Directors
Battle Director
Level Design Director
System Design Director
Environment Art Director
Character Art Director
Animation Director
Cinematic Director

Programmers
Lead Programmer
Game Programmers
Server Programmers
Graphics System Section
R&D Section

Game Designers
Gameplay Designers
Lead Battle Designer
Battle Designers
Lead Level Designer
Level Designers
Lead Event Designer
Event Designers
Testers

System Designers
Lead System Designer
System Designers

Graphic Artists
Lead Environment Artist
Environment Artists
Lead Character Artists
Character Artists
R&D Artist
Lead VFX/UI Artist
Lead VFX Artist
VFX Artists
UI Artist

Motion Designers
Lead Animatopr
Animators
Lead Rigger
Riggers

Sound Designers
Lead Sound Designer & Composer
Sound Design & Composers
Composer
Sound Designers
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Which leaves us with a staff size of... 162. That's pennies.

Winchester said:
I still buy my Nintendo titles as physical copies, so distribution costs still exist. And they've most likely sold more physical copies of BOTW than they ever did for Zelda 1 (IIRC there was a 50/50 split in physical/digital copies at launch, can't find a figure for how many they actually sold, but if it remained 50/50, then they've sold about two and a half times as many physical copies of BOTW as they did Zelda 1), so that's bunk.
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Ok, great.

So, how much is a game card for nintendo? Well if we base it off standard micro SD prices, because that's effectively what they are, we come to... 10 dollars per pack of ten 32gb microSD cards, or a single dollar each. Even if shipping doubles that, hell, quadruples that, you're still looking at... cheaper than a single game cartridge for Zelda 1. And that's 10vs1 with me just checking the price of these things on amazon, Nintendo, since they're buying in bulk, would get those cards even cheaper.

So a cartridge, to make the same money, would need to be sold for more than 10x the amount. And physical distribution of their modern game cards would need to be at a more than 10x rate to even cost the same overall, ignoring profit!

There is no justification for a game costing 70 dollars except raw greed, plain and simple.
 
vyor said:
Wow.

You'd never know it from the game itself.

Almost like... that many people didn't actually work on it or something? I mean a lot of those listed are QA and we damn well know they didn't do any work.

You want to know how many people Doom Eternal had working on it? 1,302 "devs"... except that the majority aren't actually devs. Producers, port devs, QA, random upper management(seriously the SVP of Bethesda is listed).

But ok, different genre, let's look at Elden Ring then. 1,629 developers, sounds like a lot! Then you actually go through and find that... no. No that many people didn't actually work on the game. In fact, only these people did:

Which leaves us with a staff size of... 162. That's pennies.



Ok, great.

So, how much is a game card for nintendo? Well if we base it off standard micro SD prices, because that's effectively what they are, we come to... 10 dollars per pack of ten 32gb microSD cards, or a single dollar each. Even if shipping doubles that, hell, quadruples that, you're still looking at... cheaper than a single game cartridge for Zelda 1. And that's 10vs1 with me just checking the price of these things on amazon, Nintendo, since they're buying in bulk, would get those cards even cheaper.

So a cartridge, to make the same money, would need to be sold for more than 10x the amount. And physical distribution of their modern game cards would need to be at a more than 10x rate to even cost the same overall, ignoring profit!

There is no justification for a game costing 70 dollars except raw greed, plain and simple.
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There's no justification for why games are still only 70 dollars after 40 years of inflation, you mean.

Yeah, the carts used to be expensive, and aren't anymore. But the game development itself - is two or three orders of magnitude more expensive, and they're not selling two or three orders of magnitude more copies.

Everything else has gotten more expensive. Why is games the only thing that isn't allowed to follow suit, at a *vastly* lower rate?

Edit: Also, ragging on QA people is a kind of low blow? They're the worst paid part of the staff, but without them the game wouldn't be playable at all.
 
vyor said:
Wow.

I didn't know every game needed its own custom engine again and that Unreal Engine just vanished off the face of the earth. Amazing.
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That or unity, fuck thoses two must account for 80% of the game out there
Ffs if you want a good one : remember that nowaday the market is pretty much the whole damn world unlike the 40 years ago the other seems to worship
 
Radroaches are far scarier than they have any right to be, considering their actual threat level.

I guess a roach the size of a dachshund is actually pretty scary, even if it's weak.

Also: Shotgun Supremacy.

I forget whether there was something better than the double-barrel... I remember not finding a good shotgun option.

Tried to use a hunting rifle... short-barreled because that's what I could find. The accuracy is fucking awful. The 10mm pistol had some issues, but this was horrible. I'll have to find a good ranged weapon sooner or later, but for now, shotgun works. I got the long barrel so that's something.
 
Imabot said:
There's one. Why the fuck theu NOT finished and released as buggy mess despite all those millions spend?
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Because, again, QA doesn't actually do jack shit. And even when they are working and are filing proper bug reports and even when those bugs are easy to fix... the devs and the main company don't give a fuck and ignore it.
 
It's sorta funny in a way, a lot of the old classics used to be made by extremely small studios and come out really good. Look at Doom for instance. Hell even today you get good games like Dusk and Ultrakill made with really small teams that are excellent and cheaper than the triple A offerings.

Meanwhile you see a lot of these massive studios that can't release a functioning game to save their lives. Wtf is everyone doing that their games still release broken and bugged to hell? You have a thousand plus people on payroll, surely some of them can be tossed into actually improving the game.
 
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vyor said:
If they plan DLC? 50. Otherwise 60 is fine for most games. Ten extra bucks isn't going to make them that much more money(because taxes) but it does change the economics on buying them(again, because taxes).
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Okay, so let's turn that around. There's been about 30% inflation since 2013 and now. So, a game that cost $60 then would cost $78 now, assuming games kept pace with inflation. In other words, $70 is half what the increase should be over the last ten years.

The numbers only get worse the further back you go from.
 
Amazon Climber said:
Okay, so let's turn that around. There's been about 30% inflation since 2013 and now. So, a game that cost $60 then would cost $78 now, assuming games kept pace with inflation. In other words, $70 is half what the increase should be over the last ten years.

The numbers only get worse the further back you go from.
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Winchester said:
Meanwhile, they've increased the cost of games since that time by at the most, 30%, with no accounting for inflation.

Yeah, some corps just want to milk people. Nintendo aren't entirely exempt. But I haven't seen any microtransactions outside of the *one time* DLC pass for any of their first party titles that I've played, and their online service subscription which is entirely optional.
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So game pricing is a really complicated topic that would probably take about more time then I have to go through and days to set up but to summarise, your assertions are only correct in one specific strategy in the games industry and are largely wrong in regards to the other strategies.

1) The game industry has largely optimised for the creation of cheap games in the last 30 years.
For reference let's talk about a game like Cassette Beasts which is a great game that I shill because it's that good. The approximate cost to create this game some 20 years ago , adjusting for inflation, 500k ~1.3 mil at a minimum not counting what the founders can do for free. In 2021 the price is probably about 50K.

This was initially started from the move of 100$ games to 60$ games 30 years ago and has accelerated behind the scenes for ever cheaper ways to make games. The vast majority of (competent) games are indie and small budget games and these games need relatively very little in teh way of sales to make a profit. This is the MAIN reason why games are so slow at moving away from 60$

Epic Game store was created to kill off, or at least make more expensive, teh creation and sale of indie games because big publishers don't acutally want to sell their games at 60$ , but indie games are really good at providing better value for a smaller price.

This means that a lot of game tools and technique were develop such that the industry as a whole can generate many small games cheaply and quickly in any given period of time.

2) AAA publishers and games are made to be once in a period blockbuster.

On the other hand AAA games are designed around maximising profits from 1 game per time period. This fundamentally change in strategy deviates from industry norms and creates massive problems which requires price increases or massive sales.

Since most game creation tools are generally designed for small projects, only small projects will reliably remain stable. And as AAA games are literally the opposite of how the tool is designed, incompatibilities and problems are signficantly more frequent.

This creates an exponential consumption of resources since you need to spend more time and resource fixing bugs that small indie teams don't have to deal with. And is seen in the increase in price, pre order sales, dlc, and micro transaction that infested most of AAA gaming up till this point.
 
Evillevi said:
Epic Game store was created to kill off, or at least make more expensive, teh creation and sale of indie games because big publishers don't acutally want to sell their games at 60$ , but indie games are really good at providing better value for a smaller price.
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Do you mind going into a bit of detail on this point? Don't get me wrong, I believe you, but I would like to know more about how Epic is trying to kill the indie scene.
 
searcher8 said:
Do you mind going into a bit of detail on this point? Don't get me wrong, I believe you, but I would like to know more about how Epic is trying to kill the indie scene.
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So you might remember that one of Tim sweeney boast/hype about EGS is that it's a publisher first store. Welp he wasn't lying at least at teh time he made the store. half a decade later tEGS became a very different thing since it's clear Sweeney misread the market.

EGS initial end goal so far as I can tell was that

  1. Intended to use it's closed garden status to create a market place where Publishers didn't have to compete with indies.
    1. This took various forms but basically indies can't access the store was the original interation, with version 2 being indies can get on their store but they needed to pay to win with marketing as opposed to Steams free effective marketing.
  2. With the lack of competition it'll remove a massive amount of downward price pressures that will allow publishers to up their prices
  3. With the price increase, EGS would be profitable even with the reduce profit sharing %
  4. It would give it's users the freedom to decide on how much money it'll spend on marketing and distribution rather then let Steam take a % cut and decide for them.

There are other charecteristics but the above 4 was the intended Version 1 of EGS before it became the dumpster fire that it currently is.

Thank god that Steam , for all it's faults, had cemented so much investment and work into making small scale games work that EGS couldn't actually succeed
 
Amazon Climber said:
Okay, so let's turn that around. There's been about 30% inflation since 2013 and now. So, a game that cost $60 then would cost $78 now, assuming games kept pace with inflation. In other words, $70 is half what the increase should be over the last ten years.

The numbers only get worse the further back you go from.
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Fun fact: inflation here doesn't matter because wages didn't change
 
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vyor said:
Fun fact: inflation here doesn't matter because wages didn't change
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So, I just realized what's bugging me about this response: Nobody else cares about wages not changing either. You're not upset that they're being greedy, you're upset that they're not being altruistic.
 
So, FTL: Faster Than Light isn't exactly a game that is short on letting the player commit war crimes, but I'm pretty sure that I just committed what can only be described as an ultra-war crime.

f8oj1zyv641b1.jpg


For context for those who haven't played the game, I first used a shipboard hacking system to hack the life support system of the enemy ship, draining it of oxygen before firing on select systems to disable the weapons, the crew teleporter, and the life support system itself. Basically, I ensured that the enemy ship had no way to fight back against me, and the crew were all trapped on their ship as the air slowly ran out and everyone died of suffocation. However, the rebel ship also happens to be equipped with a Clone Bay, which causes dead crew to respawn... into a ship without any oxygen in it.

As a result, they instantly start to take suffocation damage while the game's AI has them make a beeline to trying to repair the weapons. Then, after they lose about half their health, the AI suddenly realizes "Oh crap, I'm going to die from suffocation damage!" and sends them to try and repair O2 instead. The problem is, if you stop repairing a ship's system before managing to bring back at least one full bar of system health, it resets all your progress, and the spawned in crew don't have enough time to repair a full bar of weapons health before they get sent off to repair the O2 system. Furthermore, with how hacking the O2 room causes it to take longer to repair, as well as putting blast doors over the entrances, the Rebels all die before they can repair the O2 on top of that, resetting the progress on that repair too. Then, after they die, the Clone Bay respawns them, making them repeat the process all over again for infinity/until I get bored at seeing them all die over and over again, and finally blow up their clone bay so I can salvage the ship.

I have effectively subjected the crew of this rebel ship to a never ending, perpetual death loop. This isn't your average Crimes Against Sapient Life. This is ADVANCED Crimes Against Sapient Life.
 
Amazon Climber said:
So, I just realized what's bugging me about this response: Nobody else cares about wages not changing either. You're not upset that they're being greedy, you're upset that they're not being altruistic.
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Wages as a whole haven't changed much while profits go up and up and up... mass markets mean profits go up even with a smaller profit margin you know.
 
vyor said:
Wow.

I didn't know every game needed its own custom engine again and that Unreal Engine just vanished off the face of the earth. Amazing.
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No you don't have to make a new engine from scratch for each game, but if you want to stick out from the crowd you have to customize your engine a bit, tailor it to whatever you want to make. Which rapidly gets complicated as you start adding features that interact with each other, hence why fifty+ times as many actual programmers, by your own count, worked on TOTK as did on TLoZ in order to customize their version of Havok Physics Engine.

Anyway I'm done arguing. I've been around since the days where one game cost the same as my monthly food bill, and now they're down about a quarter of it despite the price hike. And in the same time, the games I pick have gone from generating 15 hours of enjoyment to generating 150, or more. By that measurement, games as a source of entertainment are 40 times cheaper now than they were when I was a kid, as I only need one game every year as opposed to one game a month to have the same amount of stuff to do.
 
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