2 ms·

What I dont understand is that over the 10 years the size of the market has gone up, sales of blockbuster games have gone up, average selling price of a game ha

by dman 17y ago

What I dont understand is that over the 10 years the size of the market has gone up, sales of blockbuster games have gone up, average selling price of a game has gone up, revenues via additional digital content has come in, product placement has trickled into some games, cost of servers has gone down, cost of bandwidth has gone down, cost of hiring programmers has roughly remained the same, some games have even gotten money via movie rights. What is it about publishers cost structure that pushes them to nickel and dime customers inspite of all the above mentioned factors ?

jparise 17y ago
Development costs have gone up. Even if the cost of hiring individual programmers has remained constant (and I don't have evidence one way or another there - we'd have to consult something like Game Developers' annual salary survey and apply the appropriate adjustments), development teams have definitely grown in size. Bigger teams mean more developers (from all disciplines), including additional management and QA staff. There are also other cost areas to consider, such as licensing fees and devkit costs, but I'm afraid that I can't share specific numbers there.
- dman 17y ago
  http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_costs http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_costs - That suggests that game dev costs have nearly tripled over the last ten years. I also think the same timeframe saw the cost of a game go from ~20 to ~60. Admittedly I always bought games a fair bit of time after they got released, so my recollection on game costs might be biased / incorrect. Also - cost of devkits has in fact gone down. Suggested by the page that I linked to, and I know for a fact otherwise. At least the PS3 devkit and the Nintendo DS devkit are very reasonably priced.
  - ShardPhoenix 17y ago
    New AAA games have never cost as little as $20. The increase is more like 50 -> 60.

by dman 17y ago

jparise 17y ago

Development costs have gone up. Even if the cost of hiring individual programmers has remained constant (and I don't have evidence one way or another there - we'd have to consult something like Game Developers' annual salary survey and apply the appropriate adjustments), development teams have definitely grown in size. Bigger teams mean more developers (from all disciplines), including additional management and QA staff. There are also other cost areas to consider, such as licensing fees and devkit costs, but I'm afraid that I can't share specific numbers there.

dman 17y ago
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_costs http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_costs - That suggests that game dev costs have nearly tripled over the last ten years. I also think the same timeframe saw the cost of a game go from ~20 to ~60. Admittedly I always bought games a fair bit of time after they got released, so my recollection on game costs might be biased / incorrect. Also - cost of devkits has in fact gone down. Suggested by the page that I linked to, and I know for a fact otherwise. At least the PS3 devkit and the Nintendo DS devkit are very reasonably priced.
- ShardPhoenix 17y ago
  New AAA games have never cost as little as $20. The increase is more like 50 -> 60.