
The cost of games - napsterbr
https://www.raphkoster.com/2018/01/17/the-cost-of-games/
======
falcolas
<rant>

This is a prime example of the practice of lying with numbers. There are two
very basic "cost" graphs which are notably missing from this narrative, and
the addition of "bytes" as a major factor in deciding the value of a game to
players.

The two missing graphs are: Cost per unit sold, and revenue per unit sold. As
basic as these are to any good cost/benefit analysis, their absence indicates
that they do not agree with the narrative that the price of games needs to go
up; that companies need to milk more money out of their customers.

As for bytes, the presence or absence of bytes has no practical impact on the
value of a game to a consumer. If it did, Duke Nukem Forever would be a game
worthy of game of the century, whereas Faster Than Light would be forever
consigned to the scrapheap.

Perhaps the most telling in this narrative is EA's own comment to investors
that shutting down the sale of lootboxes in Battlefront would not result in
them losing money. This indicates that retail sales alone were sufficient to
offset the cost of development, licensing, and marketing.

</rant>

I also don't condone piracy, but to imply that we should feel sorry for these
companies who are barely scraping by is blatantly dishonest. It is especially
dishonest when you consider that the bigger publishers (the ones making the
outlier games on all of those cost charts) have annual profits in the billions
while (oops, rant didn't end) they prey on those susceptible to gambling
addictions.

~~~
jblow
Not everything is a conspiracy. I know the author of this article and he is a
straightforward person.

The game industry is a big place with many different kinds of people in it,
all of whom have different motivations.

If you build a picture for yourself wherein everyone is That Guy At EA Who Put
Loot Boxes Into Battlefront 2, then that picture will probably get in the way
of your understanding what everyone is being said by everyone else in the
industry who is not that one guy.

This article is targeted primarily _at developers_ , not at gamers. It is an
"oh crap what do we do" article, because believe me, that is a big problem and
in general we do not know what to do.

This was not some "cost of games need to go up because blah blah"
justification article ... it is a straightforward look at what has been
happening and some musings about what we can do about it, with "cost of games
will probably rise" thrown in as a 6-word aside near the end (at which time he
also points out that nobody wants to do this, which is true).

You're reading the article you want to read, not the article that the author
wrote.

~~~
lacker
1\. Thanks for making Braid that was great

2\. I believe you that the author is a straightforward person and I don't
think there's anything malicious here. Still, it's not a good dataset. It's
250 data points collected in an ad hoc way. A single decision like "do we
include PUBG or not" can sway every statistic in here. So I don't think it's a
good idea to make any conclusions based on this data.

~~~
lj3
If you have a better data set on which to make decisions, feel free to share
it. People need to make the best decisions they can with the information
available to them.

------
megaman22
Play time in my Steam library is overwhelmingly tilted towards just a few
titles. Overwhelmingly, these are older, sandboxy games that have had strong
modding scenes. The number one game in my library is Medieval Total War 2. I
believe I paid $10, on sale, for it plus all of its expansions. After Steam,
and Sega took their cuts, Creative Assembly got a pittance, and I've gotten
over a thousand hours of gameplay. The community mod makers that expanded that
game massively (those that didn't end up hired by CA, anyway) never made a red
cent for their labors of love. I love that game, and it's a tremendous value
for me.

Much as I dislike it, trickle out DLC and in-app purchases are one way to try
to extract more value out of that massive investment. But it's a tough
proposition, going against everything that already exists. I could never buy
another game, and have more gameplay available to me than I could ever exhaust
in multiple lifetimes.

People will always make games, because they love doing it. But it's not really
rational; you've got to be good _and_ catch lightning in a bottle

------
orbitingpluto
"If you want to preserve the games you love, you can help by not pirating,"

conflicts with:

Did Nintendo actually sell us a Mario ROM on the Virtual Console?

[https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/01/22/nintendo-virtual-
co...](https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/01/22/nintendo-virtual-console-
super-mario-rom/)

Or if you go onto a retro gaming site like GOG you'll see that many of the
"extras" are from pirated sources.

~~~
galapago
> Or if you go onto a retro gaming site like GOG you'll see that many of the
> "extras" are from pirated sources.

Can you give one or two examples of this?

~~~
Springtime
I'd be interested as well. Certainly being DRM-free GOG.com's content
typically ends up on torrent sites, but I haven't heard of it the other way
around—though there are of course various examples of pirated content
appearing in officially published downloads elsewhere I've read about and even
experienced first-hand. One that comes to mind was 90s hip-hop act De La Soul
generously releasing their discography for free during Valentines Day a few
years back to promote a new record, which from some ID3 tags mentioned the
source were pirated copies.

You have to wonder when an artist finds it easier to copy the albums from such
sources than from the collection of their own.

~~~
maxsilver
> but I haven't heard of it the other way around

I can't find the article I read this from, but a few years ago (back when GoG
was 'Good Old Games'), there was an article about how license holders often
didn't have any of the actual game material, they just happened to own the
license to them through mergers / aquisitions / bankruptcies / whatever. So
GoG would have to track down old published copies of games for them (either
through second hand shops, or eBay, or the internet) and then restore them
(using a combination of internet / open source tools, or their own work), in
order to sell them on their store.

Presumably, if the internet 'pirates' had not done the work of backing this
software up and preserving it, a number of GoG's titles simply would not exist
today in any form, and could no longer be sold (even if the license holders
wanted to)

I would imagine downloading a 'pirated' copy of the work _is not piracy_ when
you already hold a valid legal license to that work, by definition.

~~~
ABCLAW
>I would imagine downloading a 'pirated' copy of the work is not piracy when
you already hold a valid legal license to that work, by definition.

You are not necessarily in the clear; it depends on type of license you have,
and whatever personal copy/fair use protections your country has.

------
indubitable
Price per MB is a questionable metric that I think the author made
insufficient effort to justify. The PS3, for instance, sent game sizes
skyrocketing in an effort to try to demonstrate the perks of blu-ray. A number
of games included all audio localizations on each disc in lossless formats.
That likely saved studios money since localized distribution could all come
from the same production line, but it sent the $/megabyte way down which this
author implies means studios are earning less. It's a nonsensical datum
without some justification and that justification was not provided in this
article.

I also think that that datum leads to questionable conclusions. For instance
you're paying _vastly_ more for AAA games today than you were in the past. The
author is right that the upfront cost is certainly much lower, but we've
changed from a model where you're paying for a fully fleshed out game to one
where you pay for a stripped down product that is intended to be sold
piecemeal. In many cases users are paying to unlock content that is literally
already on the disc they purchased. That first $60 you pay is simply your
"starter pack." And there are additional 'meta costs' as well. Instead of
simply putting the game in and running it you're instead obligated to pay an
annual fee to use your own internet connection and then exposed to various
advertisements on your way to launching the game and games themselves
increasingly even feature more advertisements on their launch screens. These
advertisements, in effect, increase the cost to the player if we assume they
are effective.

Why not use profit margins? Total revenue / (total development + total
marketing)? In either case, it doesn't really matter. Games are like music in
that they are self sustaining since people will continue develop them even
absent a profit motive. This is even more true today thanks to platforms like
Steam removing the necessity of publishers from the entire industry. Seeing
the end of 'fee-to-pay' or AAA games would bother me no more than seeing the
end of Justin Biebers.

------
earenndil
There are two forecasts at the end based on exponential growth. The thing to
remember about exponential growth is that it is inherently unsustainable.
Consider Moore's law. I once read part of a book from 2005-ish about the
singularity whose basic premise was that by ~2050 or so we'd have enough
computing power to stuff orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more power
into a now-sized CPU. And this was in a completely serious tone, mind you. Now
we see the slow demise of Moore's law over the past 3-5 years and it seems
ridiculous that we could have ever believed something like that just a decade
ago!

The state of advancement in the fields of human society, technology, and
science, at their current rates, is such that around 2500 all of human society
will be overturned every week, day, hell, minute or so. Which obviously is
nonsensical.

Note also, however, that forecast #2's best-fit line doesn't seem to fit the
points very well...

~~~
singularity2001
Exponential growth can be sustained for millions of years, see life on earth.
Moore's law lives on in GPUs and TPUs.

~~~
neel_k
Total biomass actually peaked 540 million years ago, at the end of the
Proterozoic era. See Figure 2 (on page 88) in Franck et al.: Causes and timing
of future biosphere extinctions.

Link:
[https://www.biogeosciences.net/3/85/2006/bg-3-85-2006.pdf](https://www.biogeosciences.net/3/85/2006/bg-3-85-2006.pdf)

~~~
Jyaif
You are not contradicting the parent at all.

------
timavr
Just looking on Bungie LinkedIn, they employ 800 employees. Industry standard
burn rate per month is 10k. So around 96m a year minimum. They will have
tonnes of outsourcing expenses, testing etc etc.

So Destiny 2 on 3 year cycle at minimum 300m on dev costs alone, most likely
higher.

~~~
aaron-lebo
The worst part is it's a beautiful but poorly-made game. Even their biggest
fans hate what they've done.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_ab...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_absolutely_bungled_its_communication/)

[https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-
sc...](https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-schreier)

What good is employing 800 people and spending 100 million a year to develop a
bad final product? If you want to know where the tech industry can be
attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency.

~~~
always_good
>If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that
massive inefficiency.

How is this different from any large, ambitious project? It's also essentially
an art project where you have to make content people enjoy, so engineering
resources won't save the day like they can in tech. And you can end up in a
place where your lead visionary ended up in a place where they just couldn't
deliver on it or it just wasn't the necessary vision, so you have to replace
them.

Seems weird to ascribe all this to "tech". Turns out, things are hard. To me,
Destiny 2's failure has more in parallel with the fact that most people never
finish developing a game nor writing a book.

~~~
aaron-lebo
It's probably not much different, but tech is a force multiplier, and we are
discussing the tech industry. There are many companies that are oversized. It
doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with
8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that.

If your goal is to put out the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster every few
years, then that model "works" (or it works for the publisher), but if you
want to make a great game, there must be better ways of doing it.

You don't reboot a project of that size a little over a year before release
without major management issues (this is not even counting the issues that saw
Joe Staten and a lot of the old Bungie team leave in the middle of Destiny 1).
By all accounts, Destiny 2 is a step backwards from the original. If you've
got a working engine and a lot of artists and virtually unlimited resources
(as Bungie did), all you've got to do is not fuck things up. But they did.

There's an inefficiency there that's preventing good games from being made,
and it's not just because things are hard, because they did most of the hard
stuff 4 years ago.

~~~
badpun
> It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one
> with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of
> that.

There is no sure path to making a great game (or a great anything), so
corporate entities cannot depend on it - investors demand predictability. What
they CAN depend on though is throwing hundreds of people into making a game of
unknown quality (probably mediocre) but with amazing assets, and possibly with
an outside IP (a Batman game etc.). So far, this strategy seems to be a valid
one.

~~~
fhood
I don't know, some studios seem to have found a formula for consistently
producing above average games. Look at From, Bethesda (the developers not the
publishers) or Valve. I think it may have a lot to do with giving a medium
sized team a long time, rather than a long one a short time.

~~~
sleepybrett
Bethesda games are uniformly buggy piles of crap that are only fixed after
100s of hours of modded in fixes. Bethesda is only saved as an entity because
they embrace modding.

Valve is a very bad example, yes they consistently make above average games,
however they don't make many and as a dev studio i'm sure valve is deep in the
red, they don't make money on their games, they make money on steam.

------
cthor
Getting Over It: With Bennet Foddy breaks all these rules and was wildly
successful.

The Witness sold at $40 and people bought it anyway.

Good games will sell. But you might not have a good game.

The market doesn't owe you anything.

Also what kind of bogus metric is "price per MB"?

~~~
sdhgaiojfsa
I don't think it's necessarily true that good games will sell. Some will,
sure, but others may not. There are massive numbers of games that fly under
the radar and never really catch on, and some of these are bound to be good.
Like anything else, there's an element of luck involved. Simply being good is
not enough.

Price per MB seems like an attempt to capture the amount of work that goes
into a game, but I agree it's not a great metric. You can decrease price per
megabyte just by shipping models and textures with higher resolution, even
though they don't cost you anything more to create.

------
aaron-lebo
This is interesting coming from Koster who was the lead designer of some of
the the most interesting MMOs ever made in _Ultima Online_ and _Star Wars
Galaxies_.

SWG had the misfortune of releasing in 2003, by 2005 EA was trying to compete
with WoW and within a few years had nuked the game so much that they ended up
canceling it. There is a great emulator out there for it, though the game at
this point shows its age.

------
crispweed
Maybe the solution is to reuse or share content a bit more? Seems wasteful,
for example, that the huge worlds created for some of todays AAA open world
games are used only for those games.

------
j_s
Money is important, but is there a place here to discuss the 'time' cost of
games? Games are a useful tool for relaxation and other purposes (and a
comparatively inexpensive hobby) but in my case it is easy to get carried
away! For my most serious addiction I have chosen to time-box my gaming by
only paying for two months each update (every other year-ish).

It takes conscious effort and self discipline to change direction toward
creation instead of consumption. The tiny bit of gamification here on HN has
me completely hooked, but I cling to the notion that my participation is
creating some value (however slight). I look forward to the day when
maintaining CRUD web apps is properly gamified, so I can earn money playing
games!

PS. There is another opportunity cost of games vs. alternatives which require
strenuous physical exertion that cumulatively improve health and conditioning
(exercise, sports, etc.).

------
rpdillon
I still play Morrowind regularly (it came out in 2003), and I sometimes wonder
if gamedev would be more sustainable if we focused on increasing the half life
of games. I think that approach is more viable with single player experiences,
since multiplayer is more dependent on a critical mass of players.

~~~
fancyPantsZero
Isn't this the opposite of the solution, though? If devs only made games that
lasted 15 years, they would probably sell way fewer games in aggregate.

------
davewasthere
Cost per bytes? Makes no sense at all.

However cost per hours played... That would be a metric worth exploring. Using
some combination of how many people own it, how many hours played on average
and cost of game... That would give you the 'value' of each game.

[http://steamcharts.com/top](http://steamcharts.com/top)

I think back to a game like Manic Miner which was less than 48kB, giving me
hours more fun than say Don't Starve (still a good game), which cost me a few
bucks on sale and I've played about half an hour... yet comes with a 600Meg
install size.

------
saturdaysaint
Is pirating still a huge issue? Granted, I'm not a broke college student any
more, but with the ease of Steam and outrageous sales and giveaways, I'm
amazed even broke kids would still bother.

