(sorry if it’s the wrong place for this kind of discussion)
Yesterday The Riftbreaker raised its price 50% for base game and 65% for dlcs. I know Steam said all devs to adjust prices(in January), but this feel more of trend where once a game gets popular the price skyrocket.
As someone who waits a game go 75% or a stable 50% discount before buying it, if i didnt buy it by then sure i ain’t buying that now unless there is a massive discount (not even gonna talk about games that raise price to fake a bigger discount).
I dont want to sound cheap; I grew up with no condition to buy games and spent a lot of my internet in torrents in my youth, now i gladly pay for games but once a game raise its price i unwishlist it.
Sure, if you want to only talk about AAA games, yeah, the cost is going up. But in general, cost has gone down.
Unless you only one scrappy in the games made by three person dev team they really haven’t. The cost for making a game that was good in 2015 has gone down, sure. But it behooves you to show that game development in general, and yes that includes indie developers, has gone down.
A 10 person dev team in any major city is going to cost you between $500,000 and $1mill a year just to staff.
I’m not only talking about AAA. I’m pointing out some of the things you missed in your assessment.
Like I said, even indie studios today spend more to make their non-sprite, full featured games than studios did making NES games. And then those indie games sell for $20 or $30 instead of the full $60 price point. So the content-to-development cost ratio is still shit