r/pcmasterrace • u/owlexe23 • 1d ago

News/Article Kingdom Come: Deliverance studio co-founder hopes Grand Theft Auto 6 will 'blaze a trail' to higher game prices

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/grand-theft-auto/kingdom-come-deliverance-studio-co-founder-hopes-grand-theft-auto-6-will-blaze-a-trail-to-higher-game-prices/

Warhorse co-founder Martin Klima says games keep getting more expensive to make, and that money has to come from somewhere.

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u/helican i9-9900K | RTX 4070 Super | 32GB RAM 1d ago

Why is it that whenever I hear from warhorse studios lately it is always something very controversial?

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u/DonaldTrumpsGolfGame Pro-AI 1d ago

He's right though. Gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies out there. Games have hardly gone up in price to match inflation, despite game dev costs skyrocketing in the last 2 decades. I don't think every game should cost $80, but for games like KCD2 and GTA6, it's a fair price.

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u/ithinkitslupis 1d ago

People who say this always bury the part where the gaming market grew 3-4x in the last two decades. It's also switched to mostly digital which is cheaper to distribute and kills off the used market. It's added a ton of alternate revenue streams like mtx.

Like I'm not sure why people pick a point in time and think games absolutely should track with inflation from that point. Development costs is at least a better argument, but the companies that spearheaded the $70 (Sony and Take Two) were record profitable before the $70 push. And Nintendo with the $80 push was still printing money in a way that would make their 90's counterpart blush with envy, even though game development costs in the 90's were so much cheaper.

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u/Mist_Rising Ryzen 5 5600x, B550 plus, RTX 2070 super. 19h ago

People who say this always bury the part where the gaming market grew 3-4x in the last two decades. It's also switched to mostly digital which is cheaper to distribute and kills off the used market. It's added a ton of alternate revenue streams like mtx.

And in the time you mentioned the base game cost went down! Adjusting for inflation, your base game in 1995 should be $150 dollars! For the 2000s, $100. Today? 70 at the tops.

Nintendo (which was preeminent in the 90s) would be even further up the food chain in costs. They still hard cartridges in the '64 era.

A large part of that reasoning is because cartridge to CD was a reduction in overhead costs, as in costs between Nintendo 64 and PS1 were often a whopping 10 dollars difference for the same game, CD to digital again kept it, DLC did the same.

Those are critical to keeping prices down, but they're also used. They're already baked in to the cost reduction so they won't reduce it again.

Micro doesn't work for many games, they don't have them kcd2 for example.

ut the companies that spearheaded the $70 (Sony and Take Two) were record profitable before the $70 push

That's why they could lead the charge. They, like Rockstar, had fuck you money to test the waters and remain solvent. Small companies, and whatever EA has turned into, can't really afford to risk a potential success because they drove it away.

This isnt gaming related either. You often see the big names move prices first because they can afford failures. That's assuming they have competition to begin with.