10 ms·

The cost of games

137 points by napsterbr 9y ago

megaman22 9y ago
Play time in my Steam library is overwhelmingly tilted towards just a few titles. Overwhelmingly, these are older, sandboxy games that have had strong modding scenes. The number one game in my library is Medieval Total War 2. I believe I paid $10, on sale, for it plus all of its expansions. After Steam, and Sega took their cuts, Creative Assembly got a pittance, and I've gotten over a thousand hours of gameplay. The community mod makers that expanded that game massively (those that didn't end up hired by CA, anyway) never made a red cent for their labors of love. I love that game, and it's a tremendous value for me. Much as I dislike it, trickle out DLC and in-app purchases are one way to try to extract more value out of that massive investment. But it's a tough proposition, going against everything that already exists. I could never buy another game, and have more gameplay available to me than I could ever exhaust in multiple lifetimes. People will always make games, because they love doing it. But it's not really rational; you've got to be good and catch lightning in a bottle
earenndil 9y ago
There are two forecasts at the end based on exponential growth. The thing to remember about exponential growth is that it is inherently unsustainable. Consider Moore's law. I once read part of a book from 2005-ish about the singularity whose basic premise was that by ~2050 or so we'd have enough computing power to stuff orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more power into a now-sized CPU. And this was in a completely serious tone, mind you. Now we see the slow demise of Moore's law over the past 3-5 years and it seems ridiculous that we could have ever believed something like that just a decade ago! The state of advancement in the fields of human society, technology, and science, at their current rates, is such that around 2500 all of human society will be overturned every week, day, hell, minute or so. Which obviously is nonsensical. Note also, however, that forecast #2's best-fit line doesn't seem to fit the points very well...
- singularity2001 9y ago
  Exponential growth can be sustained for millions of years, see life on earth. Moore's law lives on in GPUs and TPUs.
  - w0utert 9y ago
    Except that it doesn't. There are no forms of life on earth that have been growing exponentially for millions of years. Sooner or later growth and expansion always hits its limits and populations stabilize or decrease.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - Sacho 9y ago
    But this is the problem of exponential growth - you can sustain it without even noticing the detrimental effects, until suddenly you can't. The resource usage of all the doubling time periods until the last one would have used up only 50% of the resources available(this could be millions of years, depending on the exponent), and then suddenly the last one would use up all the resources left. This is repeatedly exemplified in Professor Allen Bartlett's talk "Arithmetic, Population and Energy"(video link at specific point: https://youtu.be/sI1C9DyIi_8?t=1337 https://youtu.be/sI1C9DyIi_8?t=1337 transcript: http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populatio...)
  - neel_k 9y ago
    Total biomass actually peaked 540 million years ago, at the end of the Proterozoic era. See Figure 2 (on page 88) in Franck et al.: Causes and timing of future biosphere extinctions. Link: https://www.biogeosciences.net/3/85/2006/bg-3-85-2006.pdf https://www.biogeosciences.net/3/85/2006/bg-3-85-2006.pdf
    - Jyaif 9y ago
      You are not contradicting the parent at all.
- scrooched_moose 9y ago
  The difference between exponential growth and sigmoidal growth [1] is extremely difficult to tell in the beginning. I tend to believe everything is actually the latter, we just haven't gotten to the point they diverge yet. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
- alkonaut 9y ago
  I was under the impression that Moore’s law was still alive and well. Obviously game cost can’t sustain exponential growth if the market doesn’t grow exponentially (potential buyers times what they are able/willing to pay).
  - earenndil 9y ago
    Nope! Quantum tunneling has made it so that the size of transistors can only shrink so far before electrons start essentially teleporting one from the other. AFAIK we might be able to get to ~3nm lithography (TSMC is shooting for it but beyond by 2020 or 2023, IBM apparently already had 5 or 7nm (forget which) lithography but hasn't published it yet), but beyond that the future is much less clear.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      So it already flattened below doubling every 18 months, or we think it will flatten because of barriers at 3-5nm? The trend graph here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law Shows little tendency to flatten. What I assume will happen when nVidia wants 10k stream processors on the same lithography as 5k are today, is that they will have to double the die area and struggle with yield instead? (Assuming the die can grow without communication problems)
      - earenndil 9y ago
        I think it's some of each? There does appear to be a slight plateau towards the end, and the graph does seem to bear some similarity to a sigmoid function[1]. I know it's more theory, though, I saw an article in nature about it a while ago.
        earenndil 9y ago
        Gah, typos! More THAN theory, and 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
- jackmott 9y ago
  >I once read part of a book from 2005-ish about the singularity whose basic premise was that by ~2050 or so we'd have enough computing power to stuff orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more power into a now-sized CPU. And this was in a completely serious tone, mind you I think by 2050 that will be more or less true compared to 2005 when you consider GPUs/TPUs etc
orbitingpluto 9y ago
"If you want to preserve the games you love, you can help by not pirating," conflicts with: Did Nintendo actually sell us a Mario ROM on the Virtual Console? https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/01/22/nintendo-virtual-console-super-mario-rom/ https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/01/22/nintendo-virtual-co... Or if you go onto a retro gaming site like GOG you'll see that many of the "extras" are from pirated sources.
- galapago 9y ago
  > Or if you go onto a retro gaming site like GOG you'll see that many of the "extras" are from pirated sources. Can you give one or two examples of this?
  - Springtime 9y ago
    I'd be interested as well. Certainly being DRM-free GOG.com's content typically ends up on torrent sites, but I haven't heard of it the other way around—though there are of course various examples of pirated content appearing in officially published downloads elsewhere I've read about and even experienced first-hand. One that comes to mind was 90s hip-hop act De La Soul generously releasing their discography for free during Valentines Day a few years back to promote a new record, which from some ID3 tags mentioned the source were pirated copies. You have to wonder when an artist finds it easier to copy the albums from such sources than from the collection of their own.
    - maxsilver 9y ago
      > but I haven't heard of it the other way around I can't find the article I read this from, but a few years ago (back when GoG was 'Good Old Games'), there was an article about how license holders often didn't have any of the actual game material, they just happened to own the license to them through mergers / aquisitions / bankruptcies / whatever. So GoG would have to track down old published copies of games for them (either through second hand shops, or eBay, or the internet) and then restore them (using a combination of internet / open source tools, or their own work), in order to sell them on their store. Presumably, if the internet 'pirates' had not done the work of backing this software up and preserving it, a number of GoG's titles simply would not exist today in any form, and could no longer be sold (even if the license holders wanted to) I would imagine downloading a 'pirated' copy of the work is not piracy when you already hold a valid legal license to that work, by definition.
timavr 9y ago
Just looking on Bungie LinkedIn, they employ 800 employees. Industry standard burn rate per month is 10k. So around 96m a year minimum. They will have tonnes of outsourcing expenses, testing etc etc. So Destiny 2 on 3 year cycle at minimum 300m on dev costs alone, most likely higher.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  The worst part is it's a beautiful but poorly-made game. Even their biggest fans hate what they've done. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_absolutely_bungled_its_communication/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_ab... https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-schreier https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-sc... What good is employing 800 people and spending 100 million a year to develop a bad final product? If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency.
  - always_good 9y ago
    >If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency. How is this different from any large, ambitious project? It's also essentially an art project where you have to make content people enjoy, so engineering resources won't save the day like they can in tech. And you can end up in a place where your lead visionary ended up in a place where they just couldn't deliver on it or it just wasn't the necessary vision, so you have to replace them. Seems weird to ascribe all this to "tech". Turns out, things are hard. To me, Destiny 2's failure has more in parallel with the fact that most people never finish developing a game nor writing a book.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      It's probably not much different, but tech is a force multiplier, and we are discussing the tech industry. There are many companies that are oversized. It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. If your goal is to put out the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster every few years, then that model "works" (or it works for the publisher), but if you want to make a great game, there must be better ways of doing it. You don't reboot a project of that size a little over a year before release without major management issues (this is not even counting the issues that saw Joe Staten and a lot of the old Bungie team leave in the middle of Destiny 1). By all accounts, Destiny 2 is a step backwards from the original. If you've got a working engine and a lot of artists and virtually unlimited resources (as Bungie did), all you've got to do is not fuck things up. But they did. There's an inefficiency there that's preventing good games from being made, and it's not just because things are hard, because they did most of the hard stuff 4 years ago.
indubitable 9y ago
Price per MB is a questionable metric that I think the author made insufficient effort to justify. The PS3, for instance, sent game sizes skyrocketing in an effort to try to demonstrate the perks of blu-ray. A number of games included all audio localizations on each disc in lossless formats. That likely saved studios money since localized distribution could all come from the same production line, but it sent the $/megabyte way down which this author implies means studios are earning less. It's a nonsensical datum without some justification and that justification was not provided in this article. I also think that that datum leads to questionable conclusions. For instance you're paying vastly more for AAA games today than you were in the past. The author is right that the upfront cost is certainly much lower, but we've changed from a model where you're paying for a fully fleshed out game to one where you pay for a stripped down product that is intended to be sold piecemeal. In many cases users are paying to unlock content that is literally already on the disc they purchased. That first $60 you pay is simply your "starter pack." And there are additional 'meta costs' as well. Instead of simply putting the game in and running it you're instead obligated to pay an annual fee to use your own internet connection and then exposed to various advertisements on your way to launching the game and games themselves increasingly even feature more advertisements on their launch screens. These advertisements, in effect, increase the cost to the player if we assume they are effective. Why not use profit margins? Total revenue / (total development + total marketing)? In either case, it doesn't really matter. Games are like music in that they are self sustaining since people will continue develop them even absent a profit motive. This is even more true today thanks to platforms like Steam removing the necessity of publishers from the entire industry. Seeing the end of 'fee-to-pay' or AAA games would bother me no more than seeing the end of Justin Biebers.
j_s 9y ago
Money is important, but is there a place here to discuss the 'time' cost of games? Games are a useful tool for relaxation and other purposes (and a comparatively inexpensive hobby) but in my case it is easy to get carried away! For my most serious addiction I have chosen to time-box my gaming by only paying for two months each update (every other year-ish). It takes conscious effort and self discipline to change direction toward creation instead of consumption. The tiny bit of gamification here on HN has me completely hooked, but I cling to the notion that my participation is creating some value (however slight). I look forward to the day when maintaining CRUD web apps is properly gamified, so I can earn money playing games! PS. There is another opportunity cost of games vs. alternatives which require strenuous physical exertion that cumulatively improve health and conditioning (exercise, sports, etc.).
saturdaysaint 9y ago
Is pirating still a huge issue? Granted, I'm not a broke college student any more, but with the ease of Steam and outrageous sales and giveaways, I'm amazed even broke kids would still bother.
- katastic 9y ago
  Absolutely. I got Skyrim for $13 and played ~130 hours of it. I've paid more for a pizza. Game piracy is mostly relegated to other countries--especially ones that AAA studios aren't targeting. I've heard countless stories of people pirating software that simply isn't available in their country. But a look here shows game piracy is basically dead in the USA: https://successfulsoftware.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/piracybsa.png https://successfulsoftware.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/pirac... http://media.economist.com/images/20090516/CIN439.gif http://media.economist.com/images/20090516/CIN439.gif Meanwhile, do services like Origin and Uplay even support countries like Georgia? And if movies were actually sold like Steam and Humble Bundles, they'd sell like hotcakes. But Hollywood is still run by old farts who don't understand that people wait for merch to come down to their price, to purchase, and if they can't, many will simply pirate. How many people do you know who share Netflix passwords with family members/friends? Like... 90%?
- hsljekskfh 9y ago
  yep, it's one reason why all game studios are focusing on weird online-only piecemeal content instead of putting out a finished project that cost $100m.
falcolas 9y ago
<rant> This is a prime example of the practice of lying with numbers. There are two very basic "cost" graphs which are notably missing from this narrative, and the addition of "bytes" as a major factor in deciding the value of a game to players. The two missing graphs are: Cost per unit sold, and revenue per unit sold. As basic as these are to any good cost/benefit analysis, their absence indicates that they do not agree with the narrative that the price of games needs to go up; that companies need to milk more money out of their customers. As for bytes, the presence or absence of bytes has no practical impact on the value of a game to a consumer. If it did, Duke Nukem Forever would be a game worthy of game of the century, whereas Faster Than Light would be forever consigned to the scrapheap. Perhaps the most telling in this narrative is EA's own comment to investors that shutting down the sale of lootboxes in Battlefront would not result in them losing money. This indicates that retail sales alone were sufficient to offset the cost of development, licensing, and marketing. </rant> I also don't condone piracy, but to imply that we should feel sorry for these companies who are barely scraping by is blatantly dishonest. It is especially dishonest when you consider that the bigger publishers (the ones making the outlier games on all of those cost charts) have annual profits in the billions while (oops, rant didn't end) they prey on those susceptible to gambling addictions.
- AndrewOMartin 9y ago
  Jim Sterling, is that you? To help avoid accusations of not adding anything to the discussion; Jim Sterling is a video games essayist who publishes well researched and presented polemic on the games industry on YouTube.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    No, but I'm both flattered and bothered by the comparison. :D Jim Sterling provides a viewpoint not commonly shared even among some of the more critical video game reviewers (such as that even cosmetic lootboxes are bad for the consumer), and it's provided a few insights I hadn't thought of previously. And yes, the EA quote is also one of his favorites - it is very telling. He has created hell of a persona - one hell of an offensive persona - but it hides a lot of really useful insight and sly humor.
crispweed 9y ago
Maybe the solution is to reuse or share content a bit more? Seems wasteful, for example, that the huge worlds created for some of todays AAA open world games are used only for those games.
aaron-lebo 9y ago
This is interesting coming from Koster who was the lead designer of some of the the most interesting MMOs ever made in Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. SWG had the misfortune of releasing in 2003, by 2005 EA was trying to compete with WoW and within a few years had nuked the game so much that they ended up canceling it. There is a great emulator out there for it, though the game at this point shows its age.
cthor 9y ago
Getting Over It: With Bennet Foddy breaks all these rules and was wildly successful. The Witness sold at $40 and people bought it anyway. Good games will sell. But you might not have a good game. The market doesn't owe you anything. Also what kind of bogus metric is "price per MB"?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily true that good games will sell. Some will, sure, but others may not. There are massive numbers of games that fly under the radar and never really catch on, and some of these are bound to be good. Like anything else, there's an element of luck involved. Simply being good is not enough. Price per MB seems like an attempt to capture the amount of work that goes into a game, but I agree it's not a great metric. You can decrease price per megabyte just by shipping models and textures with higher resolution, even though they don't cost you anything more to create.
- Raph_Koster 9y ago
  Getting Over It (which is awesome) is exactly the sort of deeply systemic game that the article advocates needs to become more common.
rpdillon 9y ago
I still play Morrowind regularly (it came out in 2003), and I sometimes wonder if gamedev would be more sustainable if we focused on increasing the half life of games. I think that approach is more viable with single player experiences, since multiplayer is more dependent on a critical mass of players.
- fancyPantsZero 9y ago
  Isn't this the opposite of the solution, though? If devs only made games that lasted 15 years, they would probably sell way fewer games in aggregate.
davewasthere 9y ago
Cost per bytes? Makes no sense at all. However cost per hours played... That would be a metric worth exploring. Using some combination of how many people own it, how many hours played on average and cost of game... That would give you the 'value' of each game. http://steamcharts.com/top http://steamcharts.com/top I think back to a game like Manic Miner which was less than 48kB, giving me hours more fun than say Don't Starve (still a good game), which cost me a few bucks on sale and I've played about half an hour... yet comes with a 600Meg install size.

137 points by napsterbr 9y ago

Play time in my Steam library is overwhelmingly tilted towards just a few titles. Overwhelmingly, these are older, sandboxy games that have had strong modding scenes. The number one game in my library is Medieval Total War 2. I believe I paid $10, on sale, for it plus all of its expansions. After Steam, and Sega took their cuts, Creative Assembly got a pittance, and I've gotten over a thousand hours of gameplay. The community mod makers that expanded that game massively (those that didn't end up hired by CA, anyway) never made a red cent for their labors of love. I love that game, and it's a tremendous value for me. Much as I dislike it, trickle out DLC and in-app purchases are one way to try to extract more value out of that massive investment. But it's a tough proposition, going against everything that already exists. I could never buy another game, and have more gameplay available to me than I could ever exhaust in multiple lifetimes. People will always make games, because they love doing it. But it's not really rational; you've got to be good and catch lightning in a bottle

earenndil 9y ago

There are two forecasts at the end based on exponential growth. The thing to remember about exponential growth is that it is inherently unsustainable. Consider Moore's law. I once read part of a book from 2005-ish about the singularity whose basic premise was that by ~2050 or so we'd have enough computing power to stuff orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more power into a now-sized CPU. And this was in a completely serious tone, mind you. Now we see the slow demise of Moore's law over the past 3-5 years and it seems ridiculous that we could have ever believed something like that just a decade ago! The state of advancement in the fields of human society, technology, and science, at their current rates, is such that around 2500 all of human society will be overturned every week, day, hell, minute or so. Which obviously is nonsensical. Note also, however, that forecast #2's best-fit line doesn't seem to fit the points very well...

singularity2001 9y ago
Exponential growth can be sustained for millions of years, see life on earth. Moore's law lives on in GPUs and TPUs.
- w0utert 9y ago
  Except that it doesn't. There are no forms of life on earth that have been growing exponentially for millions of years. Sooner or later growth and expansion always hits its limits and populations stabilize or decrease.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Sacho 9y ago
  But this is the problem of exponential growth - you can sustain it without even noticing the detrimental effects, until suddenly you can't. The resource usage of all the doubling time periods until the last one would have used up only 50% of the resources available(this could be millions of years, depending on the exponent), and then suddenly the last one would use up all the resources left. This is repeatedly exemplified in Professor Allen Bartlett's talk "Arithmetic, Population and Energy"(video link at specific point: https://youtu.be/sI1C9DyIi_8?t=1337 https://youtu.be/sI1C9DyIi_8?t=1337 transcript: http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populatio...)
- neel_k 9y ago
  Total biomass actually peaked 540 million years ago, at the end of the Proterozoic era. See Figure 2 (on page 88) in Franck et al.: Causes and timing of future biosphere extinctions. Link: https://www.biogeosciences.net/3/85/2006/bg-3-85-2006.pdf https://www.biogeosciences.net/3/85/2006/bg-3-85-2006.pdf
  - Jyaif 9y ago
    You are not contradicting the parent at all.
scrooched_moose 9y ago
The difference between exponential growth and sigmoidal growth [1] is extremely difficult to tell in the beginning. I tend to believe everything is actually the latter, we just haven't gotten to the point they diverge yet. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
alkonaut 9y ago
I was under the impression that Moore’s law was still alive and well. Obviously game cost can’t sustain exponential growth if the market doesn’t grow exponentially (potential buyers times what they are able/willing to pay).
- earenndil 9y ago
  Nope! Quantum tunneling has made it so that the size of transistors can only shrink so far before electrons start essentially teleporting one from the other. AFAIK we might be able to get to ~3nm lithography (TSMC is shooting for it but beyond by 2020 or 2023, IBM apparently already had 5 or 7nm (forget which) lithography but hasn't published it yet), but beyond that the future is much less clear.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    So it already flattened below doubling every 18 months, or we think it will flatten because of barriers at 3-5nm? The trend graph here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law Shows little tendency to flatten. What I assume will happen when nVidia wants 10k stream processors on the same lithography as 5k are today, is that they will have to double the die area and struggle with yield instead? (Assuming the die can grow without communication problems)
    - earenndil 9y ago
      I think it's some of each? There does appear to be a slight plateau towards the end, and the graph does seem to bear some similarity to a sigmoid function[1]. I know it's more theory, though, I saw an article in nature about it a while ago.
      - earenndil 9y ago
        Gah, typos! More THAN theory, and 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
jackmott 9y ago
>I once read part of a book from 2005-ish about the singularity whose basic premise was that by ~2050 or so we'd have enough computing power to stuff orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more power into a now-sized CPU. And this was in a completely serious tone, mind you I think by 2050 that will be more or less true compared to 2005 when you consider GPUs/TPUs etc

orbitingpluto 9y ago

"If you want to preserve the games you love, you can help by not pirating," conflicts with: Did Nintendo actually sell us a Mario ROM on the Virtual Console? https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/01/22/nintendo-virtual-console-super-mario-rom/ https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/01/22/nintendo-virtual-co... Or if you go onto a retro gaming site like GOG you'll see that many of the "extras" are from pirated sources.

galapago 9y ago
> Or if you go onto a retro gaming site like GOG you'll see that many of the "extras" are from pirated sources. Can you give one or two examples of this?
- Springtime 9y ago
  I'd be interested as well. Certainly being DRM-free GOG.com's content typically ends up on torrent sites, but I haven't heard of it the other way around—though there are of course various examples of pirated content appearing in officially published downloads elsewhere I've read about and even experienced first-hand. One that comes to mind was 90s hip-hop act De La Soul generously releasing their discography for free during Valentines Day a few years back to promote a new record, which from some ID3 tags mentioned the source were pirated copies. You have to wonder when an artist finds it easier to copy the albums from such sources than from the collection of their own.
  - maxsilver 9y ago
    > but I haven't heard of it the other way around I can't find the article I read this from, but a few years ago (back when GoG was 'Good Old Games'), there was an article about how license holders often didn't have any of the actual game material, they just happened to own the license to them through mergers / aquisitions / bankruptcies / whatever. So GoG would have to track down old published copies of games for them (either through second hand shops, or eBay, or the internet) and then restore them (using a combination of internet / open source tools, or their own work), in order to sell them on their store. Presumably, if the internet 'pirates' had not done the work of backing this software up and preserving it, a number of GoG's titles simply would not exist today in any form, and could no longer be sold (even if the license holders wanted to) I would imagine downloading a 'pirated' copy of the work is not piracy when you already hold a valid legal license to that work, by definition.

timavr 9y ago

Just looking on Bungie LinkedIn, they employ 800 employees. Industry standard burn rate per month is 10k. So around 96m a year minimum. They will have tonnes of outsourcing expenses, testing etc etc. So Destiny 2 on 3 year cycle at minimum 300m on dev costs alone, most likely higher.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
The worst part is it's a beautiful but poorly-made game. Even their biggest fans hate what they've done. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_absolutely_bungled_its_communication/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_ab... https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-schreier https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-sc... What good is employing 800 people and spending 100 million a year to develop a bad final product? If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency.
- always_good 9y ago
  >If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency. How is this different from any large, ambitious project? It's also essentially an art project where you have to make content people enjoy, so engineering resources won't save the day like they can in tech. And you can end up in a place where your lead visionary ended up in a place where they just couldn't deliver on it or it just wasn't the necessary vision, so you have to replace them. Seems weird to ascribe all this to "tech". Turns out, things are hard. To me, Destiny 2's failure has more in parallel with the fact that most people never finish developing a game nor writing a book.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    It's probably not much different, but tech is a force multiplier, and we are discussing the tech industry. There are many companies that are oversized. It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. If your goal is to put out the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster every few years, then that model "works" (or it works for the publisher), but if you want to make a great game, there must be better ways of doing it. You don't reboot a project of that size a little over a year before release without major management issues (this is not even counting the issues that saw Joe Staten and a lot of the old Bungie team leave in the middle of Destiny 1). By all accounts, Destiny 2 is a step backwards from the original. If you've got a working engine and a lot of artists and virtually unlimited resources (as Bungie did), all you've got to do is not fuck things up. But they did. There's an inefficiency there that's preventing good games from being made, and it's not just because things are hard, because they did most of the hard stuff 4 years ago.

indubitable 9y ago

Price per MB is a questionable metric that I think the author made insufficient effort to justify. The PS3, for instance, sent game sizes skyrocketing in an effort to try to demonstrate the perks of blu-ray. A number of games included all audio localizations on each disc in lossless formats. That likely saved studios money since localized distribution could all come from the same production line, but it sent the $/megabyte way down which this author implies means studios are earning less. It's a nonsensical datum without some justification and that justification was not provided in this article. I also think that that datum leads to questionable conclusions. For instance you're paying vastly more for AAA games today than you were in the past. The author is right that the upfront cost is certainly much lower, but we've changed from a model where you're paying for a fully fleshed out game to one where you pay for a stripped down product that is intended to be sold piecemeal. In many cases users are paying to unlock content that is literally already on the disc they purchased. That first $60 you pay is simply your "starter pack." And there are additional 'meta costs' as well. Instead of simply putting the game in and running it you're instead obligated to pay an annual fee to use your own internet connection and then exposed to various advertisements on your way to launching the game and games themselves increasingly even feature more advertisements on their launch screens. These advertisements, in effect, increase the cost to the player if we assume they are effective. Why not use profit margins? Total revenue / (total development + total marketing)? In either case, it doesn't really matter. Games are like music in that they are self sustaining since people will continue develop them even absent a profit motive. This is even more true today thanks to platforms like Steam removing the necessity of publishers from the entire industry. Seeing the end of 'fee-to-pay' or AAA games would bother me no more than seeing the end of Justin Biebers.

j_s 9y ago

Money is important, but is there a place here to discuss the 'time' cost of games? Games are a useful tool for relaxation and other purposes (and a comparatively inexpensive hobby) but in my case it is easy to get carried away! For my most serious addiction I have chosen to time-box my gaming by only paying for two months each update (every other year-ish). It takes conscious effort and self discipline to change direction toward creation instead of consumption. The tiny bit of gamification here on HN has me completely hooked, but I cling to the notion that my participation is creating some value (however slight). I look forward to the day when maintaining CRUD web apps is properly gamified, so I can earn money playing games! PS. There is another opportunity cost of games vs. alternatives which require strenuous physical exertion that cumulatively improve health and conditioning (exercise, sports, etc.).

saturdaysaint 9y ago

Is pirating still a huge issue? Granted, I'm not a broke college student any more, but with the ease of Steam and outrageous sales and giveaways, I'm amazed even broke kids would still bother.

katastic 9y ago
Absolutely. I got Skyrim for $13 and played ~130 hours of it. I've paid more for a pizza. Game piracy is mostly relegated to other countries--especially ones that AAA studios aren't targeting. I've heard countless stories of people pirating software that simply isn't available in their country. But a look here shows game piracy is basically dead in the USA: https://successfulsoftware.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/piracybsa.png https://successfulsoftware.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/pirac... http://media.economist.com/images/20090516/CIN439.gif http://media.economist.com/images/20090516/CIN439.gif Meanwhile, do services like Origin and Uplay even support countries like Georgia? And if movies were actually sold like Steam and Humble Bundles, they'd sell like hotcakes. But Hollywood is still run by old farts who don't understand that people wait for merch to come down to their price, to purchase, and if they can't, many will simply pirate. How many people do you know who share Netflix passwords with family members/friends? Like... 90%?
hsljekskfh 9y ago
yep, it's one reason why all game studios are focusing on weird online-only piecemeal content instead of putting out a finished project that cost $100m.

falcolas 9y ago

<rant> This is a prime example of the practice of lying with numbers. There are two very basic "cost" graphs which are notably missing from this narrative, and the addition of "bytes" as a major factor in deciding the value of a game to players. The two missing graphs are: Cost per unit sold, and revenue per unit sold. As basic as these are to any good cost/benefit analysis, their absence indicates that they do not agree with the narrative that the price of games needs to go up; that companies need to milk more money out of their customers. As for bytes, the presence or absence of bytes has no practical impact on the value of a game to a consumer. If it did, Duke Nukem Forever would be a game worthy of game of the century, whereas Faster Than Light would be forever consigned to the scrapheap. Perhaps the most telling in this narrative is EA's own comment to investors that shutting down the sale of lootboxes in Battlefront would not result in them losing money. This indicates that retail sales alone were sufficient to offset the cost of development, licensing, and marketing. </rant> I also don't condone piracy, but to imply that we should feel sorry for these companies who are barely scraping by is blatantly dishonest. It is especially dishonest when you consider that the bigger publishers (the ones making the outlier games on all of those cost charts) have annual profits in the billions while (oops, rant didn't end) they prey on those susceptible to gambling addictions.

AndrewOMartin 9y ago
Jim Sterling, is that you? To help avoid accusations of not adding anything to the discussion; Jim Sterling is a video games essayist who publishes well researched and presented polemic on the games industry on YouTube.
- falcolas 9y ago
  No, but I'm both flattered and bothered by the comparison. :D Jim Sterling provides a viewpoint not commonly shared even among some of the more critical video game reviewers (such as that even cosmetic lootboxes are bad for the consumer), and it's provided a few insights I hadn't thought of previously. And yes, the EA quote is also one of his favorites - it is very telling. He has created hell of a persona - one hell of an offensive persona - but it hides a lot of really useful insight and sly humor.

crispweed 9y ago

Maybe the solution is to reuse or share content a bit more? Seems wasteful, for example, that the huge worlds created for some of todays AAA open world games are used only for those games.

aaron-lebo 9y ago

This is interesting coming from Koster who was the lead designer of some of the the most interesting MMOs ever made in Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. SWG had the misfortune of releasing in 2003, by 2005 EA was trying to compete with WoW and within a few years had nuked the game so much that they ended up canceling it. There is a great emulator out there for it, though the game at this point shows its age.

cthor 9y ago

Getting Over It: With Bennet Foddy breaks all these rules and was wildly successful. The Witness sold at $40 and people bought it anyway. Good games will sell. But you might not have a good game. The market doesn't owe you anything. Also what kind of bogus metric is "price per MB"?

deleted 9y ago
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sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
I don't think it's necessarily true that good games will sell. Some will, sure, but others may not. There are massive numbers of games that fly under the radar and never really catch on, and some of these are bound to be good. Like anything else, there's an element of luck involved. Simply being good is not enough. Price per MB seems like an attempt to capture the amount of work that goes into a game, but I agree it's not a great metric. You can decrease price per megabyte just by shipping models and textures with higher resolution, even though they don't cost you anything more to create.
Raph_Koster 9y ago
Getting Over It (which is awesome) is exactly the sort of deeply systemic game that the article advocates needs to become more common.

rpdillon 9y ago

I still play Morrowind regularly (it came out in 2003), and I sometimes wonder if gamedev would be more sustainable if we focused on increasing the half life of games. I think that approach is more viable with single player experiences, since multiplayer is more dependent on a critical mass of players.

fancyPantsZero 9y ago
Isn't this the opposite of the solution, though? If devs only made games that lasted 15 years, they would probably sell way fewer games in aggregate.

davewasthere 9y ago

Cost per bytes? Makes no sense at all. However cost per hours played... That would be a metric worth exploring. Using some combination of how many people own it, how many hours played on average and cost of game... That would give you the 'value' of each game. http://steamcharts.com/top http://steamcharts.com/top I think back to a game like Manic Miner which was less than 48kB, giving me hours more fun than say Don't Starve (still a good game), which cost me a few bucks on sale and I've played about half an hour... yet comes with a 600Meg install size.