
The lessons of Bulletstorm and the problem with price-points - danso
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-05-29-the-astronauts-in-2014-USD60-for-a-game-is-a-little-insane
======
incision
Good article, bad choice of quote to take out of context for a title leading
to a load of comments about history and inflation.

That's not at all the point here. It's about persistent, clunky notions about
hit-making in the game industry.

 _> 'The problem with the AAA world is not the games; the problem is the
structure of assumptions and arbitrary targets that surrounds them.'_

 _> 'Gotta tick those boxes. Gotta justify that $60 price-point. And here's
the rub: in a digital world, whether AAA or indie, those restrictions should
be irrelevant.'_

I think that's spot on.

\---

Note: The original article/HN title was 'The Astronauts: "In 2014, $60 for a
game is a little insane"'. HN has since been updated to something much more
descriptive.

~~~
Retric
People talk down about AAA games, but Skyrim despite being an ok game at
release is far better value for money than any Indy game simply from all the
free content. Modern graphics engines and real world building take capital and
lots of it.

~~~
krisdol
I don't think you can objectively say that. I spent many hundreds of hours in
Minecraft, which I paid something life $5 for back in infdev. I also spent
less on both Dark Souls games and sure enjoyed them more, but I wouldn't call
them AAA (though that may be debatable).

A $60 game to me, commmunicates a rehash of the same ideas we've seen in
gaming for decades and/or a sub 10-hour campaign with a bland multiplayer
experience.

~~~
criley2
Minecraft is the outlier, not the rule for indie games and for multiple
reasons.

It has a modding community larger than most actual game communities for
indies. That's extremely rare in indies (and even AAA's!) to achieve an Elder
Scrolls level of modding. Some of the modlaunchers/modapis that I use have
more versions and active development than some indie games I play, and that's
before we consider the mods themselves (hundreds, almost thousands, available
for every MC point release) which are almost all separate projects being
actively maintained.

And two, Minecraft is a procedurally generated emergent game, an rarity among
all games.

My point is that it's wrong to use Minecraft as a generalization for "indie"
game, when it breaks most of the rules/paradigms that most indies follow.

">A $60 game to me, commmunicates a rehash of the same ideas we've seen in
gaming for decades and/or a sub 10-hour campaign with a bland multiplayer
experience."

Yeah, like Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas.

~~~
NoPiece
It is not the rule, but neither is it an outlier. From the last several years
I'd also point to indie games like Terraria, Starbound, Kerbal Space Program,
The Binding of Isaac, Torchlight, FTL, and Spelunky.

~~~
criley2
Eh I don't like the list. IMO only Terraria and Starbound should be in the
same category. Throw Cubeworld in there too, even though the dev wasn't
capable of handling the demands of modern indie games and the project fell
from popularity. There's some space ones like Space Engineers and StarMade.

Games like torchlight are ARPG's played on rails, with zero emergent gameplay.
Same with BoI when I played it, it's a rougelike not an emergent game. It
wasn't a world to explore but levels to complete in order. KSP can be emergent
but requires you to play very specifically to experience the content. FTL is
cool but it's linear by design, no exploration, no freedom, no building, no
game world destruction etc, just running from and attacking things on a mostly
linear random path. But FTL is a game to play and finish, Minecraft is an
emergent experience, a world to work on until you abandon your world.

~~~
NoPiece
You are right they don't necessarily compare well to Minecraft as systemic
games. But they have procedurally generated worlds, and rival the best AAA
games in terms of amount of gameplay they offer, and at a fraction of the
price. I have over 200 hours into Spelunky, and it still frequently manages to
surprise me.

------
maerF0x0
From my perspective the value of games has plummeted because I do not enjoy
many of the AAA titles. I dont like looking down the barrel of a gun and
shooting humans (or human like formations of pixels).

I would pay $60 upfront and $10 a month to play a RTS like command and conquer
or SC2 (not the new new MMO one) that is on a long lived or persistent map w/
set teams (factions).

It has to have no annoying timers, not feel like grinding and cannot charge me
incremental dollars to get further in the game "recharge" packs, "advisors" to
unlock end game functionality, or premium currency that (in practice) cannot
be obtained otherwise.

Hell, I might just quit my job and learn to build this game.

~~~
ChuckMcM
You might find folks to help you with that project, but lets work the business
mechanics a bit to see if you could get it funded.

$10/month - So how much load does the game put on a server? And what sized
server? That's important because if you have a bunch of dedicated AWS
instances they can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, if you
put them on demand you will have to figure out the latency issues.

The game is going to change quickly, and as you said its multiplayer and
'persistent maps' so lots of memory? Recovery if you lose a machine in the
middle of the game? And a staff of Game Masters who can help angry 11 yr olds
trying to get their 'Mom's crappy Dell' to play the game with a decent frame
rate.

To put it a different way, I would love to play that game too, and I would pay
$10 a month, but could I run it at $10 a month in at least a cash flow break-
even mode? Turn based games are easier with their arbitrary latency allowance,
RTS gets to be less easy. Especially if one player lagging out freezes the map
for everyone? So perhaps the game engine isn't the challenging part, perhaps
the backend stack is a harder challenge, or the support infrastructure. I
don't know but I wonder about that some times.

~~~
maerF0x0
Continuous value could be added from a few game mechanics:

1\. Games could have a true end. One faction wins, game over, server reset.
2\. Different maps. Could be worked in the "game over" scenario or could be
running concurrently. 3\. Different "ages": the game code could adequately
work with past, present and futuristic units, giving users different
experiences when they play.

As for AWS costs, I really have no idea the kind of load you would get from
that game, but given a C3.xlarge is about $175 a month (or less for reserved),
I'd be shocked to hear that you cannot serve at least 175 concurrent users
from that server-- giving about $1500 a month profit per server utilized. IMO
dev costs, engineer time etc will far far outstrip the infrastructure costs.

------
jblow
The article is good, but I agree that the headline taken out of context is
highly misleading.

In the context of the article it makes sense. But out of context it appears to
be saying that all games should cost a lot less than $60, which really isn't
the point.

In fact to justify a luxury price point you just have to give people something
they really want. For example, right now lots of people are paying $150 to get
into the beta for Elite: Dangerous, a game that I presume will be
substantially cheaper in full release:

[http://elite.frontier.co.uk/](http://elite.frontier.co.uk/)

If $60 is insane then $150 is totally nutballs, yet that is what a nontrivial
slice of people are paying, because this beta is giving them something they
want that they can't get any other way.

(Note: In the alpha, people were paying $295!)

~~~
venomsnake
Elite is a game that is of (sadly) extinct genre geared towards people that
when they played that games are now in their earning prime.

Same with the people that threw money at obsidian, Brian Fargo and Tim
Schaffer.

It is paying premium price for a product due to supply demand.

//I miss Freelancer so so much.

~~~
windust
// and Wing Commander including Armada, Descent, and Freespace (even Star Wars
Tie Fighter). The last Space Sim that I found was Strike Suit Zero
([http://store.steampowered.com/app/209540/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/209540/))
which is nice, but not as epic as the WC series.

~~~
lotharbot
Descent is still actively being played in a modern incarnation. You can find
the info to get started at
[http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php](http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php)
or the short version at the top of
[http://descentrangers.com/Home/Index](http://descentrangers.com/Home/Index)

[disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders of DCL, a junior officer in Rangers,
and my wife is the primary developer of D1x-retro.]

I also have friends who actively play and mod Freelancer. Their team is at
[http://ripteam.com/](http://ripteam.com/) [Disclosure: I'm a member of team
RIP, though only in their Descent 3 division.]

------
rayiner
I bought (well my parents bought) FFVI (III in the U.S.) and Secret of Mana
for I believe $80 each in 1993-94. That's $127 in today's money. The standard
SNES cart was like $50, or $80 in today's money. Games have gotten a lot
cheaper even as game budgets have exploded.

~~~
adamors
They may have gotten cheaper if you count it like that, but standard SNES
games were not riddled with bugs on release day.

(On PC at least) it's quite common for a AAA game to launch riddled with bugs.
Recently it was Watch_Dogs which costs 60€ on Steam, yet it has a lot of
performance issues, the publishers client has connectivity problems etc.

~~~
rayiner
So the problem is not that $60 is insane for a game, but rather that games
these days are crap?

~~~
venomsnake
AAA these days are crap. The majority of them. When you scale the team to a
thousand people on 4 continents you are doomed to slide into mediocrity. Too
many moving parts, too many demands to satisfy, too much content to be able to
polish it effectively, budgets that don't allow innovation and risk taking.
You know Assassin's Creed 3 in all of its boring shining. In the indie and
mobile there are gems of pure brilliance for fraction of the price.

The only AAA title so far this year that game me good value for money was
Reaper of Souls, mostly because devs listened to the public and for a change
made the right decisions.

~~~
com2kid
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law)

The majority of games have always been crap. Nothing is new. Rose tinted
glasses mean we only remember the good games.

------
Vaskivo
I think the title is misleading. It implies $60 is too much for the game. But
I took the opposite from the interview.

> "The saying in the industry right now is, 'If you want to sell a game for
> $60, to the player it has to feel like $200.'"

> "Bulletstorm was a $60 game for $60. And these days $60 for a game sounds
> basically crazy, when there are literally hundreds of high quality games out
> there for a much smaller price - even on console. In 2014, $60 for a game is
> a little insane."

I believe that, economically speaking (and I now almost nothing about this),
customers pay the value they percieve the product has. Chmielarz is actually
saying that some games have a bigger value that the price they are sold. That
they priced the game right but some other games of equal value were sold
cheaper.

Or, in other words, people are paying less for games than they should.

I could rant for hours about this, but I'll refrain from it. I just wanted to
add this clarification.

~~~
sesqu
You're right, of course. The reason for this is that digital entertainment is
long-lived, cheap to produce and practically free to distribute, even moreso
than film and literature. As the demand has increased, the supply has
exploded, and the market has responded by emphasizing infungible goods,
perishable goods and rent-seeking (franchises can be argued as all three).

As supply exceeds demand, prices tend towards manufacturing costs rather than
utility provided. Suppliers therefore have to either increase demand or reduce
supply (big publishers), or segment the market (small publishers) to maximize
profit.

------
danso
I wonder how much of this sticker-shock is due to psychology and the new
market of cheap games? In New York, as far as I know, Broadway theater prices
haven't really changed...and you are paying $60 for 2-3 hours of sometimes
crummy seating, for an experience that, visually, doesn't compare to a $20
IMAX screen. And yet not many theater goers really cringes about having to pay
that fee because there is not a mindset that non-discounted shows should be
any cheaper...Hell, I even paid $200 for nearly the worst seats in the house
at "Book of Mormon" (back when it was new and really really hot)...of course
it helped that BOM was actually worth even the inflated stubhub price...

I remember back when I was in grade school, me and my brother were so excited
that we saved up enough to buy Ninja Gaiden...for the NES, not XBOX...and
someone then stole the game, which was our first new game in a loooong time
(we were not a wealthy family). $50 had a lot more value in the the
1980s...and that game was very primitive by today's standards...so thinking
about that stolen NES cartridge makes me laugh with a bit of a wince

~~~
ANTSANTS
You also have to take demographics into consideration. I'd imagine the average
gamer has much less spending money to play with than the average Broadway
theater patron.

>and that game was very primitive by today's standards

Is the _game_ primitive, or did it _look_ primitive?

I think it's important to make the distinction, because for all the fancy
technology that goes into making a AAA shooter look cool, the actual _game_
underneath it all is never terribly sophisticated, and usually even less so
than the average FPS from the 90s. Yet people nowadays will claim that
something like The Legend of Zelda, where you have a fairly nonlinear
adventure through a huge world, is more "primitive" than a modern game where
you are basically guided on rails from start to finish.

------
zoowar
More important than price is engagement value. If I spend four months with a
game, I don't mind the $60 price. Some notable examples for me: Skyrim, GTA-V,
and Dark Souls 2. However, I have played games with little or no engagement
value. BioShock 2 lasted less than 2 weeks (2 play throughs).

~~~
yiransheng
Unfortunately engagement value is only weakly linked to the price tag. It's
expected a AAA title costing $60 to give at least 70 hours of entertainment,
but beyond that it varies vastly across titles and players.

Usually, games with multiplayer features last significantly longer than single
player games, but there are exceptions like the ones you listed which all have
high replay values. Also, genres matter, open-world sandbox games lack the
intensity but enjoys longevity, the price could hardly reflect that.

Then there's Minecraft, which keeps its charm after months, for some people
even years. And it cost a lot less than the typical AAA titles.

I feel the pricing model in gaming industry is so rigid and backwards
(although no so much for casual games, eg. in app purchase and mulitplayer
games eg. esport games and MMORPGS). Some movement toward more flexible
pricing mechanisms to reflect games' contents will undoubted benefit both game
makers and players.

~~~
bentcorner
> _It 's expected a AAA title costing $60 to give at least 70 hours of
> entertainment_

Does that include multiplayer? Personally I'd be surprised to find a majority
of AAA single-player games to have that much content, barring the Skyrims and
Fallouts. For me, playing the same game past around the 20 hour mark starts to
feel like a chore.

------
sadris
Given that games cost $50 in 2000, they should be costing $68 in 2014 based on
inflation alone. So if anything, games are much cheaper today for much more
content on a man-hour basis.

~~~
mc_hammer
agreed. on a cost to earnings to enjoyment level, you save a few hours salary,
buy game for $60, and enjoy it for 10+ hours. its still a deal.

~~~
krisdol
Eh. In 2000, paying $50 for a game meant much more than 10+ hours of enjoyment
(assuming it was a game you liked). For all the polish and technological
prowess of modern games, I think most of us consider them a ripoff because of
just how little substantial content and replay value there is in many
blockbuster games.

------
macspoofing
$60 is a misnomer. Games don't cost $60, just like movies don't cost
$15/viewing. Games cost $60 for those that want to play them at release time.
Gamers who can wait, will pay anywhere from $5-$30 for AAA titles. The
economics of games have shifted and new categories have opened up (e.g.
freemium) but this kind of pricing is quite reasonable, and I don't really see
the author's point.

Furthermore, what's the alternative? Mobile, as a platform, has been out in
force for a few years now, and though there are a few gems, I've been largely
disappointed with it. Mobile gaming hasn't really evolved into producing true,
quality AAA titles.

~~~
georgeecollins
That's part of the problem. The game publisher gets like $30 of that first
sale, which for some game represents 10 users when you include the people who
buy it used. So the people that fund the game get ~$30 for the game and
Gamestop makes $100+. At some point gamestop needs to fund games to keep their
business model afloat.

It's better for the publisher to make an online game that can't be resold.

~~~
macspoofing
I was actually thinking digital sales, like steam and the xbox online store
etc. This is a good model. It feels like a healthy ecosystem. Released games
are at the $60-70 price-point, which decreased as they gradually migrate into
the long-tail of sales.

Gamestop lucked out this console generation when Microsoft caved. I sincerely
believe they won't be so lucky next gen.

------
joelennon
Ironically in the case of Bulletstorm it made a ton of sales primarily because
the Xbox 360 version included early access to the Gears of War 3 beta. If it
wasn't for the backing of Epic Games and EA, the title would likely have
tanked. Personally I'm glad it didn't, I loved the game and always thought it
was very underrated.

------
ANTSANTS
The Japanese game industry is a great place to look if you want to see
companies that understand this principle. Companies like Atlus (now owned by
Sega) are almost as big as any other AAA developer or publisher, but they've
flourished by producing concentrated, well-polished semi-niche titles, with
(by modern standards) fairly small teams and budgets, and doing it
_consistently._ Their games give me a similar feeling to a lot of the games of
the 80s and early 90s, which were made by core teams of under a dozen (or even
half a dozen) people that were still (unlike modern indie games) supported by
large corporations and not just a couple dudes in a basement. It's a "third
way" to the game industry (compared to the West, where there seems to be
little in-between the indies and the AAAs for whom millions of sales is a
failure) that is arguably closer to its roots than either.

------
jerf
_cough ahem_ Uh, everyone, the article's headline is a bit deceptive, at least
when out of context. It's not about how games should cost less than $60 to the
consumer. It's a good article, I suggest reading it before commenting.

(At the time I wrote this, it was on the old title.)

------
GVIrish
I think a big challenge for companies making console games is that now when
they're competing with the biggest franchises they're not just competing on
graphics and gameplay, they're competing on time. The best selling triple A
games have deep multiplayer experiences that can suck gamers in for 40 to over
100 hours. When a gamer plays one game for 100 hours instead of 10 games for
10 hours that means they're buying far fewer games.

Then, even if you make a game witha good multiplayer element, you're still
struggling against the tide because you need a big enough player population to
keep players engaged. It's the network effect working against you. If all of a
given gamer's friends are playing Call of Duty they're less likely to invest
in the multiplayer of another game. Or when they do go to another MP game and
there aren't many players available for matchmaking, they just give up and
move on.

The point was well made in this article that what needs to happen is that the
game dev industry needs to set more sane goals and sane budgets. There's not a
lot of room for games with $30+ million budgets because of the amount of
copies that would have to be sold and the fact that gamers only have so much
time to play. The only way to get around that would be to significantly expand
the player base, which is not happening.

------
ianstallings
I know this is about price point but I feel that some things are being glossed
over a bit - mainly the release date and the competition. At that time Mass
Effect 2 was just _killing_ it and all other games were feeling the heat.
Other good titles run over at that time included Homefront, Rift, Crysis 2,
etc. My memory is a bit vague but I do remember thinking about how terrible
they were marketing Bulletstorm.

------
PaulHoule
Who pays full price?

For a long time I played the Wii and picked up mostly used games.

Recently I got a Playstation 3 and a Vita and joined Playstation Plus where
you get a pretty generous set of free games. These are not the latest
blockbusters but instead the really great game they are following up.

On the Vita I haven't bought a single physical game, but I do get good sales
offers a lot. For instance, I never would have thought of getting Killzone
Mercenary for full price but at $20 it is a awesome game and great value. I
liked it so much I bought a used copy of the Killzone Trilogy. Later on there
was a sale on Persona 4 Golden and that too was excellent value.

My son tried "Need For Speed Most Wanted" on the Vita and we went looking for
PS3 NFS games at Gamestop. I hear "Rivals" is a good game but I can buy him
two older games that are quite different for a lot less, have a lot of fun,
and even have it written up in GameFAQS!

~~~
lighthazard
Someone has to buy it at full price for you to get it at a 'used' price.
Still, Steam sales and sales in general is how I keep my library full of games
I've never played.

~~~
aeturnum
That's totally untrue :)

If a game sells poorly , there's more pressure to discount it heavily and
quickly. But, if you like a game, you should try to buy it at full price as
that incentivizes them to make more games "like" it.

------
bato
What's annoying me with the article/opinions expressed, is that AAA games
should have multiplayer.

I think it's annoying, and I'm always thinking about what would have made it
to the game if they didn't spend time and money tacking multiplayer on top.

Obviously I must have a pretty unpopular opinion since all the new games have
multiplayer now :(

------
dang
Since people have complained about the article title, we've changed the post
to use the subtitle instead.

