You know the AAA gaming business really is something else, I swear. These companies pull out every dirty trick in the book to fleece their customers for as much as they possibly can, only to immediately turn around and cry to anyone who’ll listen about how badly they need even more. Yeah, I’m not even trying to pretend to be impartial here (not that I ever do, I guess), but this is getting beyond ridiculous at this point. Enough has to be enough at some point, doesn’t it?
The spark for my ire this time comes from some comments made by Warhorse co-founder Martin Kilma to GameSpot. Now, I like Warhorse for the most part. They’ve made some good games and haven’t engaged in most of the shady AAA monetization practices that so many of us hate. Yet, despite the studio’s success, he’s out here whining that games aren’t expensive enough, and that he wants GTA VI, Rockstar and Take Two to pave the way forward to even higher prices.
He told GameSpot that it would “help a lot” to raise unit prices, but that “everybody’s scared to death” as to actually doing it.
“Now, hopefully, GTA will blaze the trail, and it will allow us to increase the cost,” GameSpot quotes him as saying. As for why Rockstar and Take Two specifically, apparently they’re the only ones who are big enough to get away with it currently (nevermind Nintendo and Microsoft also doing it). He also claims that an overall price increase is “long overdue and necessary for this business to survive,” as if we didn’t just see the standard AAA price shoot up to $70 just a couple of years ago.
Kilma made some other comments that I find a bit nonsensical and out of touch, but I’m not going to touch on them here. Check out the GameSpot article if you’re curious. What I’d like to focus on is this fallacy that AAA games are somehow not expensive enough yet, and that the “suffering” of these companies is somehow gamers’ fault for being too stingy.
First of all, are these guys so out of touch that they don’t realize video games are a luxury product? Are they also somehow unaware that everyone’s budgets are getting squeezed tighter and tighter these days, or that the first thing to go when you’ve gotta stretch your dollars are the luxuries? Seriously, even if Rockstar did get away with charging $100 per copy (they are effectively), do they really think people would line up to pay that for their game?
Next, comments like these completely ignore the AA and indie portions of their market, which routinely charge well below $70 per copy and are doing just fine. The problem isn’t that your games need to be sold at an even greater markup. The problem is that you’ve allowed yourselves to get so big and bloated that you can’t survive without making unattainable amounts of money on the regular. In other words, it’s a structural problem.
You don’t need to keep pushing the visual and simulation envelopes in order to sell your game. You haven’t had to do it for a long time now, as we’re way past the point of diminishing graphical returns. Who cares if the sweat on Wolverine is hyper-realistic? Who cares if the world is 5,000 sq. km or some other ridiculous number? Who cares if simulated light behaves like real light? I certainly don’t.
In fact, we’re now learning the hard way that it often looks worse than intentional, artistic lighting.
This stuff doesn’t matter in the slightest! What matters is substance! What can I do and how much fun can I have doing it? All you need for your game to succeed is to have it do one fun thing and do it very well. Manage that and your game could look as simple as can be and still do fantastic numbers. Games don’t need to be more expensive. These companies just need to start being run properly.
Okay, I ranted pretty hard here. Sorry about that. If you made this far, thanks! What’s your take on these sorts of attitudes? What do you think needs to happen in the AAA space?
Image from the Grand Theft Auto 6 website