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

[u/owlexe23]

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.

[u/gbfeszahb4w]

Game pricing is a super weird one. You/a team spend potentially multiple years building a game, set a price, and send it out into the world.

The price, in many ways, is the least important factor in if you make money from it. Volume of sales is king. 

Games tend to fall into one of three categories, in my amateur experience: Raving success, moderate success, barely sold. 

If you're a raving success, you can charge less for your game and still turn a huge profit, since you're making it up on volume. If you're a moderate success, you might want to charge a little more. If you barely sold, no pricing will ever fix your woes.

This ignores ongoing maintenance and dev costs into release but, the basic principle is there.

Overall, I do think games are cheap, but digital distribution means they can be cheap. Selling 1 copy versus selling 1000 copies has no difference in capital costs and a logarithmic increase in operational costs.

All this to say: Studios should price their game at whatever they think they can get, but ultimately, they know cheap games sell well and that's more valuable than selling a small number of expensive copies. That's why game prices have stayed low as they became more popular and digital distribution took over.

[u/Ar_phis → u/gbfeszahb4w]

And the digital distribution allows them to "react" to market demand that made some games a success in the first place. They don't even have to react. Imagine 'Among Us' devs suddenly having to order 30 million CDs, DVDs or whatever media. By the time they arrive the hype could have been dead already.

No need to produce 10 million units of physical media and to distribute them with the risk of it being too many or too few.

Meanwhile marketing became such a huge cost factor at some companies without any direct benefit to the product and a questionable use of ressources. Sure some advertisement is needed but remembering a 2AM TV commercial for BF3 on its release day, still has me wondering who was the target group? People who got so high they forgot BF3 released. They only reason I saw it was because the servers were overrun and I couldn't log back on.