BG3 was insanely cheap tho when accounting for scale. It was easily 2-3 games worth of content for the price of 1 game.
And the reason it was able to achieve the scale it did, was people bought the shit out of it on presale.
I looked and checked, I bought it almost 3 years before it released. Because act 1 was already playable, and already the length of a regular 2020 full release.
Despite “never pre-order a digital good” being sound advice 99.99999% of the time, the studio and IP and it being 20 some years since the last entry made it able to fund its own development.
Expecting anyone else to replicate that absolute perfect storm that allowed for BG3 is just going to lead to constant dissapointment.
I don’t think many people are expecting a GTA or BG3 amount of content. Yea those are outliers. The problem arises when your game is the same or greater in price as those. Your game better be one hell of a unique experience if you expect people to be satisfied with that price point.
It’s weirdly like socialism. A game like GTA knows they’ll sell a shit ton of copies for years after release. Likely on multiple console generations. All those customers subsidize each others portion of the development cost.
It’s economics of scale, the greater expected sales, the less profit margin the corporation will accept.
Niche games come with a niche tax. It’s not unique to gaming.
The price point most definitely isn’t static. Before we get into actual price points there’s DLC and whether or not that’s free or how it’s priced. But for actual games there’s an $80 price point, a $70 one, and a $60 one if you want to cherry pick and only discuss “console” games. There’s still plenty of games releasing at $40 or even $20 and those are *also released on consoles but likely don’t get physical releases. Don’t act like these companies don’t have leeway to set their own prices for what they produce.
BG3 was insanely cheap tho when accounting for scale. It was easily 2-3 games worth of content for the price of 1 game.
And the reason it was able to achieve the scale it did, was people bought the shit out of it on presale.
I looked and checked, I bought it almost 3 years before it released. Because act 1 was already playable, and already the length of a regular 2020 full release.
Despite “never pre-order a digital good” being sound advice 99.99999% of the time, the studio and IP and it being 20 some years since the last entry made it able to fund its own development.
Expecting anyone else to replicate that absolute perfect storm that allowed for BG3 is just going to lead to constant dissapointment.
I don’t think many people are expecting a GTA or BG3 amount of content. Yea those are outliers. The problem arises when your game is the same or greater in price as those. Your game better be one hell of a unique experience if you expect people to be satisfied with that price point.
That’s not how any of this works…
The price point is static, $X for a console game.
It’s weirdly like socialism. A game like GTA knows they’ll sell a shit ton of copies for years after release. Likely on multiple console generations. All those customers subsidize each others portion of the development cost.
It’s economics of scale, the greater expected sales, the less profit margin the corporation will accept.
Niche games come with a niche tax. It’s not unique to gaming.
The price point most definitely isn’t static. Before we get into actual price points there’s DLC and whether or not that’s free or how it’s priced. But for actual games there’s an $80 price point, a $70 one, and a $60 one if you want to cherry pick and only discuss “console” games. There’s still plenty of games releasing at $40 or even $20 and those are *also released on consoles but likely don’t get physical releases. Don’t act like these companies don’t have leeway to set their own prices for what they produce.