Games

hiring way too many developers to work on a project

Most development companies also destroy their own built up experience after every game. Instead of using the experts (the people who have been making games for you for years) to create your next game, instead they lay those people off and hire new people.

Even better was with Kerbal Space Program 2. They didn't even allow the KSP2 devs to talk to the KSP1 devs, despite them all still being employed at the same company. The people perfectly positioned to make the next game were not allowed to touch it or even talk to the people touching it. This culminated with a disaster of a release and the community roundly rejecting KSP2 as it is significantly worse than the first. It didn't have to be this way.

That's mostly how it works for me. BG3, Elden Ring? Full price, and maybe more than one platform. Almost anything else? I'm waiting for 50%+ off.

Plus if the executive then leaves maybe the next one won't tell you to just clone whatever success has happened recently to minimize risk.

Nintendo is an interesting example to use, as their games famously don't decrease in value and honestly often sell for more than original over time.

Publishers are kinda useless tbh.

BLUF: Agreed. Games don't need realism to be fun. They need fun to be fun.

Aside from obvious genres like simulators, horror, or other niche games, graphics don't, and shouldn't be, the main focus of a game.

It could just be plain fun. I'd prefer games with a bunch of sandbox niche mechanics than seeing a tree in 4k upscale. Like Noita or Terraria.

Or a deep story. The original Talos Principle was alright on its graphics at the time, but it prioritized the story and puzzles. It was a fundamental game that shaped many of the philosophies I hold still today.

Graphics can be important, but I'd also prefer stylized over realistic any day. That's why some of the older games still hold up today, graphically.

Wind Waker, the old 3d mario games, Bioshock, Oblivion (terrain, not people lol)

All had really really solid art. And it still looks good. Because it didn't try to push the limits on making the game look real.

Back when Modern Warfare 2 released on the 360, I saw little dust clouds, and thought that it was the greatest game for realism ever at the time. The graphics were so good. Going back? Dogwater.

The 2010 style graphics would also be cheaper today, as you could get away with less optimisations and tweaks.

They already sell you games that they can remotely disable after you've purchased them, so I'd call that past anything reasonable.

I worked on a DS game back in the day, turns out the marketing budget was twice that of dev + art.

That is a good point.
On the flip side, they're not largely selling something that has any physical finiteness to it anymore, and the sales volumes have increased drastically, resulting in significantly higher profits despite a smaller inflation adjusted unit cost.

The cost of a good decreasing as an industry matures feels right. Jello cost 23¢ a box in 1940. Adjusted for inflation it should cost $5.17 a box now, but it's only $1.59.
When there's 2 games to buy, they can be justifiably more expensive than when there's a massive surplus.
The games are different, but it's not like consumers can't find a different one they'll also enjoy if the first one they look at is too expensive.

Inflation has made $60 less valuable, but they're not selling to the same market that they were 30 years ago either.
It's hard to use inflation to justify raising prices or adding exploitative features when you're already seeing higher inflation adjusted profits due to a larger more accessible market, lower risk due to reduced publishing overhead, and more options for consumers, which would be expected to bring prices down.

Games also sell at a much higher volume than they did back then.

Wages have also not kept up with inflation, which is why games at over 100$ would be out of reach as a casual hobby for most.

They sell more copies.

Fuck off with this zero-dimensional analysis.

To be honest, I have only bought one or two games at full price. Most of the games I buy are having deep discounts.

Ah yes the easy dev environment of the 1990s, too bad none of our game dev tooling, experts on the subject, cross platform porting difficulty, and physical delivery costs have all stayed EXACTLY the same.

While I generally agree, I think that there are some other ways that one could make games:

• One is to just do games incrementally. Like, you buy a game, it doesn't have a whole lot of content then buy DLC. That's not necessarily a terrible way for things to work -- it maybe means that games having trouble get cut off earlier, don't do a Star Citizen. But it means that it's harder to do a lot of engine development for the first release. Paradox's games tend to look like this -- they just keep putting out hundreds of dollars in expansion content for games, as long as players keep buying it. It also de-risks the game for the publisher -- they don't have so much riding on any one release. I think that that works better for some genres than others.

• Another is live service games. I think that there are certain niches that that works for, but that that has drawbacks and on the whole, too many studios are already fighting for too few live service game players.

• Another is just to scale down the ambition of games. I mean, maybe people don't want really-high-production-cost games. There are good games out there that some guy made on his lonesome. Maybe people don't want video cutscenes and such. Balatro's a pretty good game, IMHO, and it didn't have a huge budget.

I do think, though, that there are always going to be at least some high-budget games out there. There's just some stuff that you can't do as well otherwise. If you want to create a big, open-world game with a lot of human labor involved in production, it's just going to have a lot of content, going to be expensive to make that content. Even if we figure out how to automate some of that work, do it more-cheaply, there'll be something new that requires human labor.

22M copies sounds like a very high estimate, and there are lower estimates out there, including those in line with the math you can run against their infographics and achievement data where they may have only sold under half of that.

How are they not rolling in the dough by now? So much of the market has rolled over to digital, which means no secondary market.

Before you could pay $50 for a game, play it and sell it later for 10-$25 (depending on how quick you are), effectively making the price 25-$40.

Gaming prices should not be increasing. They should be decreasing. Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution and gaming makes so much profit its like, more than the entire music and movie industries combined. The number of people that buy games now is huge, there is no justifiable reason for prices to go up other than corporate greed.

Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD. But they didn't have a lot of the advancements that the gaming industry has today. Aside from the number of people buying games being smaller back then, the cost of manufacturing game cartridges and physical copies was a lot higher than today. Digital distribution was not realistically an option for the PC platform, and was literally not an option for consoles. Game development tools were non-existent. Most game development studios had to program their own game engines, or license one from someone that did. A lot of work was done manually, by human hand for quite some time. Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand. I mean, game engines had a period where a good user interface was unheard of.

Then you look at other issues. Game studios are too big these days. 500 people is too many people working on a project. Bigger ships are slower to turn, lean out the teams to like less than half of that number. Development cycles are too long. Games used to be developed in a year or two, three at the absolute most. Games didn't used to be as big, but you know what? They don't need to. A 10 hour game that is paced well with a good story is infinitely better than an 80 hour game where you wander around a 95% empty world experiencing a disjointed barely existent story. Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game. Games don't need some random pop song in the trailer to get people to buy it, have the composer/sond designer write the trailer music like in the old days, since that was part of their job.

And as you mention, most of the time there are few hits that sell big. This was always true, and will always be true forever. Games don't really compete with each other except for one resource: the customer's time. And people have a finite amount of time. Until people begin to have more free time, and infinite time, it doesnt matter how many games are made, they will still always compete for the customer's time. It is an immutable fact of the gaming industry.