In a post made just a few days ago, I made the comment that gamers were part of the reason why the financial environment of games it so terrible. And I want to expand on that, because just that throwaway sentence in and of itself comes across as a bit unfair.
Jim Sterling (I guess you could call him a gaming pundit) has an excellent video on the topic of game cover prices. You should watch it if you haven’t already, because it offers a lot of good counterpoints and context for what I’m going off about here.
First, what is he correct about? He’s absolutely right that adjusting the cover price of games won’t stop the predatory practices “AAA” publishers do now. The toothpaste is already out of the tube, and there’s no getting it back in.
He’s also correct that worrying about major “AAA” titles going the way of mobile pricing is too little, too late. We’re by and large already there.
But I also think he makes the same sort of mistake most pundits of most disciplines make; focusing too heavily on the top and the bottom of the food chain, and wind up ignoring the middle.
Right now, independent studios have one of two choices; either they stick to budget “retro-styled” titles that require little development costs, or they sell their souls to a major publisher. You don’t hear more and more tales of big publishers buying studios whole hog because these studios want to be wage slaves to a big soulless corporate entity… it’s because unless they want to keep making titles that look like they came out of RPG Maker, they have to.
The independent studio is basically extinct at this point because it simply isn’t financially solvent to be in operation… and a large part of that is because a $60 price point for a modern styled game that doesn’t have huge financial backing is too massive a risk for any potential indie studio to make.
The profit margin for the sort of game Sterling wants is so paper thin that one title that doesn’t sell like gangbusters means that studio is dead. Good luck finding too many people willing to take that chance.
There’s no salvaging AAA publishers at this point, and we really need to stop trying to shame them into doing the right thing. If we want the sort of deep, immersive titles of old, we’re going to need to be willing to pay more for them. That’s where the games we remember could potentially be found… but if we don’t show the willingness to support those attempts by putting more up front, the studios that might be willing to take that chance aren’t going to.
And that is something we have stubbornly and petulantly refused to do for nearly two decades at this point. Then we wonder and complain why things keep getting worse.
TKO Creations 