How Much Should Games Cost?

the year is [Music] 2005 we're deep into the sixth generation of consoles and gaming is doing pretty good so far this year I've gotten to play Devil May Cry 3 and Resident Evil 4 on my PlayStation 2 and for my Xbox Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Doom 3 finally got ported so I'm playing that as well it is so great to have so much money to buy all of these games surely there'd be no financial crisis in the future or anything in fact the future looks bright for gaming we've been holding on to this sixth

generation of consoles for a while now and games have only looked better and better but I think it's time we ask what's next and the answer to that may not exactly be what I'm hoping for see I should specify that this is May of 2005 and I'm sitting down to watch the unveiling of the next gener oh my God is that Elijah Wood from The Lord of the Rings the future of Gaming [Music] over the next month more nextg consoles would be unveiled like the PS3 and the Wii and with that the clock started ticking

down towards the seventh generation of consoles well that's great for the plethora of new games that are sure to come out you see during this sixth generation of consoles and essentially most of the early 2000s games cost about $40 to $50 obviously that's in USD and without counting for taxes but they weren't $60 not yet that is until November 22nd 2005 when Call of Duty 2 was released onto a console alongside the launch of the Xbox 360 now this wasn't the first ever $60 game in the early 2000s a game called Socom US Navy Seals

came out in 2002 and was priced at $60 but that was because it came bundled with a cheap headset no Call of Duty 2 set the standard for this next generation of gaming to be priced at $6 well there was of course some push back which I'll talk about in a bit it's undeniable that there was a jump in quality to the Seventh Generation games were longer had more content than ever told better stories and looked better than ever while doing it Publishers told people that games needed to cost more because they were getting more

expensive to make and it clearly showed in the end product putting two scarabs on screen in Halo 3 stepping outside of the Vault for the first time in Fallout 3 or falling out of a plane in Uncharted 3 lots of Threes here all of that couldn't have been done in the sixth generation and sold the idea that these games are worth now before I get too deep let me just mention that game prices are expensive pretty much everywhere else save for a few countries that aren't America I am aware this video is made from an

American perspective so I'm sorry to foreign viewers if you live in a country where games are either already $70 or perhaps even more I'm sorry a few countries off the Dome uh shout out Canada shout out turkey shout out the Philippines shout out Australia and uh Shout Out New Zealand you guys get forgot a lot let's get back to what I was talking about uh the eighth generation of consoles with the release of the Xbox One and PS4 the cost of development and size of games exploded in 2010 big budget games were averaging $30 million

to make in 2014 they could get up to 68 million and by 2020 we knew that big games were hitting hundreds of millions of dollars on average to develop not too long ago I uploaded a video about just how large games have gotten and why and not to repeat everything but just to give you an idea in 2014 we were complaining about 40 GB game downloads and then just four years later the biggest game of that year hit 120 GB to download it soon became obvious that Studios dumping hundreds of millions of dollars and tens

of thousands of hours into one project couldn't continue without something changing and so in 2020 2K and their parent company take two were the first to bravely announc to the world that we would like more money actually NBA 2K 21 a true NextGen experience priced at $70 setting the standards that for the ninth generation of consoles games are $70 now and that's pretty much where we are today big budget AAA titles that pull in the big bucks for major gaming Publishers are $70 heading towards the end of big 24 which is when this video is

uploaded by the way we've seen games like the Silent Hill 2 remake Black Ops 6 Dragon Ball sparking zero all at $70 we're still waiting on Indiana Jones and probably a few other games in 2025 I'm not mentioning all of which are set to launch at $70 I'd certainly say backlash to this has been pretty pretty vocal online but it's really up in the air if it's affected the sales of games in some meaningful way and I'd probably lean towards it hasn't maybe if there's one thing I am certain of is that backlash to the

jump from 60 to 70 has certainly been worse than the backlash from 50 to 60 see I said I was going to talk about it earlier and here I am talking about it I told you well it's certainly hard to even find discussion about things like this online because it happened in 2005 the threads I have managed to find seem to find the jump from 50 to 60 bad for them because it means they're less likely to buy a game day one not that they're entirely put off from buying games anyway and on top of

that there's significantly fewer people saying the games aren't worth $60 which is arguably the largest criticism of this generation's recent price hike let's take NBA 2K 21 for example here considering it's the game to set the $70 standard what makes this release worth $10 more compared to its previous outing NBA 2k2 here's a list of differences I noticed as someone unfamiliar with the franchise [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] when the news broke that 2K 21 would cost $70 David ismailer the president of 2K defended the decision by saying the price reflects the high quality experience you

get and of course by this I assume he means the highquality highprice microtransactions maybe even the loot boxes how about the highquality UN un skippable commercial ads that were added to the game a month after launch accidentally or and this might just be a little outside the box thinking here maybe David is referring to the fact the 2K 21 experience is so high quality that you simply can't experience it anymore a game released in 2020 is no longer available for you to purchase digitally on Steam in fact the multiplayer servers were shut down at the

end of 2022 and the game no longer receives any kind of official support because of the dependency on the servers you can't play the offline campaign mode it's gone this game is nowhere near worth $70 obviously but it's not hard to see this situation creep into many other big budget AAA games released recently while there's certainly nothing quite as egregious as NBA 2K for $70 which they're still doing by the way it's not hard to find other greedy or Half Bake experiences littering what should be a quality price point and I can already see someone

who from what my statistics tell me is the rare 38 to 45-year-old male viewer I have commenting gaming has always been like this and there's always been Duds at 50 60 or $70 and that's true I agree I'd argue though that we have a lot less AAA games releasing now than back then taking Rockstar Games for example in between GTA 4 and GTA 5 Rockstar released four console games three DLCs and I'm not even going to count whatever DS or iOS games came out sorry in between GTA 5 and the yet to be released GTA

6 Rockstar has released One console game it's not like they weren't doing anything I'm not sitting here calling Rockstar lazy they were just busy developing the most detailed and immersive open world of all time at least perhaps until GTA 6 comes out who knows I'd love to sit here and say that games cost so much now because every $70 game is a highquality labor of love that cost $200 million to develop and spent 5 to8 years in the oven but I can't say that because we don't even have a concrete answer as to why the

ninth generation games are more expensive I mean we can speculate but the real answer lies somewhere in a ly three-way Trifecta between absurd development costs inflation and just straight up corporate greed I think tackling each of these reasons separately would be the best way to present this beginning with inflation this is the one that seems the most Ironclad as a response inflation calculators for US currency are easily found online and it clearly shows paying $60 for a game in 2019 would be like spending $73 today it's even worse if you go back to the Year

2005 because then that means $60 Games should cost nearly $100 the main response I've seen to this is is that gaming has also exploded incredibly large there are more Gamers than ever and the gaming industry is more profitable than ever year overy year you see how franchises are breaking records selling the most they've ever had in history so does it still make sense to raise game prices for the ninth generation if companies are pulling in more than ever from Gamers and this is where greed gets involved because if games are so profitable year-over-year why are

we paying more for them pre-order the Vault Edition today pre-order now pre-order the Vault Edition now Call of Duty Black Ops 6 pre-order now especially when a large majority of games nowadays come jam-packed full of live service elements in microtransactions I've talked about battle passes and how stupid they can be on my channel before but I really need to hammer it in here that $70 on top of the usual live service elements we know today is egregious I will happily say right now that if a game is entirely single player I don't have an issue

with spending $70 now hold on a second I'm not saying every single player $70 priced game is worth that amount you don't have to pause the video to go out and buy Starfield for full price right now there's always been games at full price that aren't worth it no matter what the standard price of a video game is what I am saying is that for example a game like Final Fantasy 7 rebirth or tears of the Kingdom or like a dragon infinite wealth games that charge you up front and then can or sometimes do offer

upwards of a 100 hours of entertainment with no other monetization schemes besides perhaps some erroneous itions that for some reason swap around content is stupid but whatever games like that are in my opinion worth $70 does everyone agree with that perhaps not but you can buy all of these games used now at a discounted price within at most a year of release it shouldn't be and isn't an unpopular opinion that yearly sports games or Cod releases priced at $70 isn't worth it MW3 especially is just so egregious because they didn't even have the flimsy excuse

Black Ops 6 has with being on Game Pass you're paying $70 for a largely multiplayer experience yes I am aware of mw3 campaign and all five people who bought the game for the thrilling conclusion to the most 4 out of 10 story of all time it was 4 hours long and they only had 16 months to make it we get it we heard the message loud and clear the multiplayer is clearly the only thing that matters to Activision especially when you boot up the game and get bombarded with advertisements begging you to spend money on

the battle pass or at least one cosmetic you know live service games usually slash the price of the game itself to drive people into the store or at the very least understand that for a largely repetitive multiplayer experience a price like $40 is a lot more fair to the consumer like NW3 came out November 10th of 2023 and within the 51 days left in the year was still the second best selling game of 2023 $70 my ass greed all the way down there's no other reason for stuff like that and now we're here at development

costs and to me this is actually the most Ironclad argument for the reason games cost more money now critiquing this point requires looking at how massive video game publish ERS run their companies and how they prioritize what ideas to turn into games and push out the door we are deep in an era where A Game's success is essentially measured on if it makes the top 10 bestselling games of the year because even if a game does sell well the studio might still go under anyway and you have to ask yourself did that studio fail because

games cost so much money to make now or did that studio get shuttered because Xbox which is essentially just Microsoft now a company with a $3 trillion market cap is looking to recoup costs by laying off employees and shuttering studios in in the wake of spending $69 billion acquiring Activision Blizzard the next time you look at the price of a Cod game and think that the excuse for it might be development costs or inflation ask yourself why they gave the price of a whole CoD game plus100 million extra dollars to Bobby [ __ ] codic

for leaving the company what this really boils down to for me is who's asking for games to cost this much to develop how realistic do games truly need to be before the amount of money you're sinking into the project just doesn't make sense anymore do these game companies really need to spend the amount of money they have left to give to Studios remastering games less than a decade old would that price really not be better spent funding a fun new experience and taking a chance on it selling like hot cakes even in this forum thread

from 2007 many gamers discussed ways to make gaming cheaper from recommendations like holding out for sales trading renting and one user even discussing the possibilities that game companies should look into other sources of revenue to offset the cost fronted to the consumer if only you knew the Pandora's Box you were talking about camster much of that landscape has lived gone through new means that some people certainly don't know about or just straight up might not have access to Holding Out for sales is still valid game renting has kind of become Game Pass although your selections

are limited and it's not really the same in buying used games has shifted to shopping on eBay or going on sites like Green Man Gaming for cheaper digital codes the only one that's truly died seems to be trading physical copies of games in Because unless you are lucky enough to have a local game store willing to give you an actual worthwhile price for your trade-ins GameStop remains the goat at offering $287 some lint and $7 in Kohl's cash for that brand new unopened PS5 game it seems that in the ninth generation of consoles it's never

been more beneficial than now to be a patient gamer and simply wait for $70 games to drop in prices there's an article I found while making this video that I'd love to quote here the year is 2003 in this NBC news article Tom Loftus talks about the possibility of an increase in the price of games coming in the Next Generation from $49.99 to $59.99 the quote I'm most interested in from this article is all the way at the end Tom says ultimately a price increase May rest with the customers if one publisher sells a hot

new title for 60 a pop and makes a killing Publishers with similar titles May follow but if consumers determine that the gameplay can't match the price hike well Hell hath no fury like a gamer's spurn while some people have made it known by saying aloud that the current standards for gameplay aren't matching the extra $10 we're paying per game it seems not everyone is spurned and on the same page as of now $70 games are incredibly profitable with no sign of that stopping anytime soon perhaps if rumors are true for GTA 6 ushering in yet

another price increase for games due to its estimated and rumored $2 billion development cost Gamers might truly feel spurned if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing and make sure to click on the end screen to watch another