Only if the microtransactions go the fuck away forever.
“It’s definitely good for us, I think, if you give us more money”
Love how he pointed out that development costs now are way more than “the Famicom era” yeah no shit but how much did it cost to produce a cartridge vs now it’s a DVD or in the case of digital, no physical production cost.
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And they’re fine to charge whatever they want. I’ll catch them in the bargain bin.
Yes. Just one look at a modern day game budgets is enough to see that times have changed a lot.
However, I think that development cost isn’t the only metric at play here. While games do cost a lot more to be made, there is also a lot more games being sold, because the market is so much bigger than in the past.
While in the past the gaming industry was a comparatively small, it is now the biggest grossing entertainment industry, outshining the music and movie industry combined.
According to a report by SuperData Research, the global gaming market was valued at $159.3 billion in 2020. This includes revenue from console games, PC games, mobile games, and esports. To put that in perspective, the music industry was valued at $19.1 billion in 2020, while the movie industry was valued at $41.7 billion. That means the gaming industry is making more than three times as much money as the music industry and almost four times as much as the movie industry.
While of course not all of that is from pure sales, I would argue that the market is a lot more profitable than it used to be, potentially more than offsetting the development cost of the games.
With software that can generate content and improve workflows by 10-fold, and content libraries that remove the need to generate everything absolutely from scratch every single game.
Did physical production costs ever equate to ~30% that digital platforms take?
Sounds like maybe licensing and cartridges may have been really expensive for the NES/Famicom($35), but the cartridges were less than $10, maybe even $5. Most games were $45 at launch.
Accounting for inflation, gaming is cheaper than it’s ever been if you just buy the game and avoid microtransactions.
No physical production cost but internet infrastructure costs. They are distributing terabytes of data easily.
