2 ms·

>Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of huma

>Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere. Except the number of people with the skills to make games has increased (which depresses gamedev salaries), the tooling to make and publish games has become cheaper (or outright free with tools and engines like Blender, Krita, and Godot), and the overhead costs of physically publishing and distributing a game have been largely eliminated by digital publishing. To top it all off, the amount of competition in gaming has increased, which drives down prices. If anything, games should be even cheaper. And in the indie scene they usually are

hajile 5y ago
Look at modern games. They are almost all bug-ridden until the second DLC (if ever) which is probably just base content they moved out to pad the cost. By that point, you've spent $120 on the game anyway. As they say: Cheap, fast, and good -- pick two. With a larger talent pool and all the hard problems already solved, you'd expect games to INCREASE in quality with fewer bugs and issues. If they threw cheap out the window and were charging $200, they could hire and retain experienced talent who would make far fewer mistakes and the quality would increase dramatically. EDIT: To address number of people further, lets say there are 100x more talent now than in 1993. If 5 people developed Doom and 500 people are needed for a modern AAA title, then the effective supply to demand ratio hasn't changed.