Shame on Harvey Randall for platforming executive bullshit:
The problem, he puts it, is inflation. Which is an unerringly boring but also correct answer: “We live in contrasting times, where inflation is real and significant, but people expect games that are ever more ambitious and therefore expensive to develop to cost the same. It’s an impossible equation.”
They’re not responding to the expectations of the people; they’re responding to the expectations of their investors.
Meanwhile I’m still enjoying Schedule I, which is made by a single dev and has “low quality” graphics by choice. We don’t need AAA games left and right; we need good, fun ones with strong foundations. Games that don’t demand paid DLC, or season passes, or fucking Shark Cards.
I truly understand that Rockstar is under a lot of pressure as the creator/publisher of GTA. But not every company/developer needs to be like them.
According to SEC filings, Take Two Interactive studio made 2.241 Billion USD profit in 2024.
Did they release anything of note in 2024? Presumably the annual slog2k sports.
Yes, in fact the report specifically mentions that NBA 2k24 outperformed expectations. Other than that they’re probably earning passively off of older titles and GTA V microtransactions.
He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.
They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they’ll get £0. I’ll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I’m sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.
Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren’t, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they’re not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that’s make or break for the studio.
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It’s true, there are outliers like that. But if you’re looking at shutdown studios or massive layoffs at random, it’s going to generally be because the game they made lost money. In Hi-Fi Rush’s case, to the best anyone can tell, it’s because Satya Nadella changed the direction of Microsoft at a time when Tango Gameworks was starting a new project, which means there’s the least sunk costs on a project that was going to be several years away from returning a profit.
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A small portion of the Rivals team was laid off for similar reasons to Hi-Fi Rush in that the CEO changed the direction of the company. This would still be an outlier compared to the rest of the industry. Respawn got hit with layoffs because their live service isn’t making anywhere near as much money as it used to, and live services need to keep making tons of money to justify new content for them; yes, this is wholly unsustainable. A live service team getting laid off has nothing to do with whether or not it was a hit and everything to do with whether or not it’s still a hit.
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I’m disagreeing with the idea that Hi-Fi Rush and the one branch of the Marvel Rivals team being let go are a regular occurrence. In general, teams are being let go because their games aren’t making money. Their games aren’t making money because there are too many games out there that are also spending too much money on their production, and they’re being subsidized by a consumer base that’s stretched too thin to make it all work for everyone that was in the industry as little as 3 years ago.
They were probably on slightly profitable. Or, Money forbid, only breaking even.
Back of the napkin math on a number of them says that a number of them probably took a bath on what was put into them. I get the cynicism, and in many cases you’re right, but it’s been a bad time for video games lately. An industry-wide number of how many billions of dollars video games make is almost entirely coming from only a handful of games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Games like Star Wars Outlaws and Forspoken probably did lose a ton of money. Games like Concord, Avengers, and Suicide Squad lost so much money that it was impossible to not notice it, and they were each to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a lot of games out there, and the dollars tend to flow to very few of them, relatively speaking. But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
This is the solution moving forward and is probably what most studios are doing right now (see: publishers shelving low-profit studios, massive layoffs, etc.), but the issue is that the games launching right now with $70-100 price tags have been in development for years. Their budgets were written under contract during the boom a few years ago, they can’t just “unspend” that money, but at the same time, they’re probably seeing that gamers are being a lot tighter with their wallets these days.
I’m obviously never one to praise higher prices for the same thing, but I at least get why major releases are feeling justified to charge a higher door fee for the base game than to gamble on the freemium market (See: Concord).
That boom also just led to a market with way more games in it every year. With more supply and less demand, you can’t spend as much making the game and expect to be a success unless you’ve got a sure thing. So the higher prices will only be afforded by the games that would have been a success charging less than $70.
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So, their solution is to charge $90 (lets not kid ourselves, the premium, deluxe, anticipated access, special edition is going to be over $120), so even less people buy it?
LMAO, Rockstar made 9 billion dollars off GTAV micro-transactions. Fuck that noise, ain’t no one crying for billionaires. They could finance and market more than 40 different $200 million games, then give them away for free, and still break even! This is pure greed.
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Heard the same crap when they moved from 60 to 70 just a few years back.
Heard how video game development is too expensive while publishers posted record profits.
Heard all about how the same 50 dollar game "back in the day"would cost hundreds now, disregarding how gaming was so much more niche back then too.
Heard the same crap about how these “full price games” would lessen the need for egregious microtransaction
This will again, do nothing to lessen any of that, just push more record profits as gamers won’t be able to resist rewarding the gaming industry for their bad behavior.
What a bold-faced clearly obvious motherfucking lie.
Rockstar has released only 2 full games in the past 13 years because everything they’ve done since then has been funded by microtransactions. The price of entry is negligible to them when whales pay for multiple copies of the game every fuckin month.
And it’s an impossible equation for most Americans to pay more. Especially if things continue to downward spiral.
Where’s my eye patch?
Eh, this game was never in the cards for me anyway. I decided years ago to never give Rockstar another dime when they didn’t release any single player DLC for GTA5. Fuck that noise.
Wut? We’re mad now about not getting DLC? GTA V was a great game that’s still a blast today. I spent many evenings in front of my PS3 playing the single player for years, never touched GTA: O once and never felt the need to and still believe I got my $60 back in 2013 out of it.
Similar story with RDR 2. Unless GTA 6 is a huge step down from both those games in single-player playability (I’ll wait for reviews obv), I’m not going to lose much sleep over spending $20 more than I spent 13 years ago for the previous game.
GTA V was originally planned to have a number of single-player DLC campaigns akin to the ‘Lost and the Damned’ and ‘Ballad of Gay Tony’ for GTA IV.
This is what people - including me - are bitter about; the immense financial success of GTA:O (namely Shark cards) diverted all resources away from additional single-player content.
I wouldn’t have minded paying for an additional perspective campaign (like GTA IV) or an additional post-campaign chapter heist. GTA V was a complete experience at launch, so additional DLC content would have been welcomed by the community - DLC only becomes problematic when it is clearly part of the core experience, but arbitrarily removed in order to charge more.
Unfortunately, due to having to prioritise shareholder returns - investing resources into anything beyond the most immediately profitable route (ie. online) leaves the board and C-suite open to litigation, because as we should have all learned by now from this series, Capitalism will ultimately ruin everything in search for more and more profits.
If I’m remembering correctly, they had announced single player DLC bit instead just chose to develop more multiplayer stuff since that’s where the big bucks are. I’m busy and don’t have a source right now, but can attempt to find this later and edit as necessary.
Lol never seen anyone upset that a publisher put all the games content into the base game.
I will wait until GTA 6 has been out a few years lol. I have a long enough backlog already. Still haven’t started Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, and about 30 other games I mean to play. Patient gaming is the best way
if rockstar really wanted to win over all gamers, even the ones not planning to play gta, they announce base gta 6 at 50. and then have the 'early/access-10 min early-uber shark complete edition with a unique purple skin at 100 or whatever the fuck they think the whole things worth.
ROFL the more games go $80 to 90 dollars for a base game version, the more I wait for sales. 70 dollars was bad enough in my opinion, but this greed fueled jump is going to put off more potential buyers than it will bring in. It’s my genuine hope that this blows up in their face and will force them to price games reasonably again. Perhaps if the money they made in sales wasn’t mostly funneled into their overpaid CEOs and shareholders, perhaps they’d have more money to cover development costs and keep game prices stable. Sounds like a personal problem to me.
If you really want me to pay $100 for a game, you gotta raise the bar to the fuckin stratosphere compared to what we’re getting now.
And get me a damn raise.
And also knock it off with the fucking microtransactions and shit. I wouldn’t mind games costing something appropriate for inflation if we were getting complete, high quality games without the expectation that we spend even more money afterwards. As it stands, they’re complaining about the low cost of games while also milking players for every penny they can on top of the purchase price. Fuck these guys.
Precisely this. If Baldur’s Gate 3 was 100$, I still would have bought it in a heartbeat because I know that the developers are never gonna ask for any more of my money.
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Sorry, best we can do is microtransactions, fear of missing out and AI slop. That’ll be $90.
I would say gta is one of the only few games I would pay that much for and I know I’ll get my moneys worth, but I’m not interested in gta online. I wish we could get story dlc like we did with gta 4
Yeah? I’ll buy it when it’s on sale for $35 and they’ll profit, so it’s all good. Patience is a virtue and all that.
That’s such bullshit. GTA5 has been a money printing machine. They would have been profitable if the cost started and stayed at $20.
They would have profited making GTA:O free to play, right from the get go.
I can’t find the numbers online but they probably could’ve given GTA5 away for free and made a profit.
They did give it away for free and make a profit
They did both, and it could fund the next 5 GTA games for 500 years and still turn a profit if they never took another cent. Whatever this “journalism” is, delete it, block it, and forget about it. They are the enemy.
NBA 2K24 also outperformed expectations.
As of a year ago, GTA 5 had made over $9,000,000,000.
That’s a billion with a B.
Mostly off micro transactions to children.
They don’t need to charge $90, but if people will pay it, they’ll charge it.
