"Game development is significantly more expensive now" companies complain. How not to make it expensive

I'm no economist, and certainly not a developer/publisher. But I think I can see why development is so expensive nowadays. Yes, there is inflation and all that, but there is more than just that. Bellow I write a list of expenses that I consider to be unnecessary and that make producing a game expensive with no reason.

A word of warning! What I will say here might be the most retarded thing ever, but as I said, I'm no expert, I cant really tell.

-CELEBS GIVING VOICE AND LIKENESS

This has to be the most stupid expense a company can make. Hiring a celebrity to have a role in a game. Activision is a major offender. Why they had to hire Kevin Spacey?! And now, with Black ops 3 they hire a bunch of them for their MP mode in addition to some NFL player(that I cant imagine anyone outside the sport has ever heard off) to appear in the game. Why not hire someone else who might not be known, someone who is good, but wont cost you an awful lot of money? Just think about it.

-PROMOTIONAL DEALS ON OTHER PRODUCTS

Second most stupid one. Does anyone remember the halo mountain dew/doritos fiasco? Well, if you do, its not the whole fiasco I want to talk about, but rather about how much money goes into this kind of deals. When I hear that a publisher got into a promotional deal with a snack/drink company, I can't help but flip my....you know what. If that wasn't enough, most of these products don't even go outside of the US of A locking the rest of the world out of it. The only thing I can suggest is to completely stop promotional deals with snack and drink companies.

-OBLIGATORY MULTIPLAYER/SHIFT TOWARDS ONLINE

This is pretty self explenatory. Publishers order the inclusion of multiplayer even when its not necessary, just to fill that tickbox, thus inflating the budget for setting up and maintaining servers. Same goes for when online is the primary purpose of a game. Biggest offender on that front is EA. The MP focus of the last few games and the online requirement of the latest game in the NFS franchise, is not only expensive to build and maintaining the infrastructure, but also short lived and complex to develop, often times resulting in broken and badly designed games like simcity 2013, for, more often than not, no practical or meaningful purpose. Just for the (DRM)sake of it.

-OVERLY REALISTICK HD GRAPHICS

Everything has to be hyper realistic. Its simple, really. everyone strive to make the most realistic looking, eye candy game ever. With highly advanced mo-cap, and mind blowing lightning effects. Nowadays there are no games like doom 3, F.E.A.R and crysis where they were isolated cases of games pushing the envelope of realistic graphics. Now, every AAA game has to have realistic graphics and art. And yes, its expensive. Why not try more cartoony approaches and types of games other than simplistic dudebro shooters?

And thats that. I could tell you about more companies that do inefficiend developement, about games that are offenders of the above, but I got lazy....like destiny's writters huehuehuehue

Digital piracy such as CD keys and torrent also plays a role. They have to raise prices to offset the loss in revenue.

The effects of this is magnified greatly in the video gaming industry because your customer base is very internet savvy. They learn how to pirate these games from reading alot on websites and forums.

Nice points and I agree. They need to cut out the cut scenes, skip the obligatory online modes, cut back on the fluff, aka explosions and teh epicness! Not every game needs burning buildings and crashing tanks etc.

Developers should try to be more original and try making something besides shooters or hipster indies for a change.

You truly believe companies foolish takes those action with out trying to cut poor use of money.

The main cause for the increase cost for games is always increasing gamer expectation. If a AAA games is not polished in all aspects then gamers will attack it for all it worth.

The only way to make games cheaper to develop is to make them not as good.

AAA game development has ALWAYS been expensive as fu*k... and with evolving tech it is only natural the costs would skyrocket.

My only advice in this situation is.. STOP MAKING AAA games! how about some AA middle market budget games? Hitman,GTA,Call of duty ALL started out as "Middle market" AA games.. its as if the middle market budget games stopped being made after the PS2 era.

They can start by not targeting "wider audiences" and stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and arranging review events.

I'll sell you your computer for a cheap price. Just contact me for the deal.

stop advancing the tech and capability of the systems...at least for a time. they cant do it indefinately because that would also cause stagnation.

it costs more resources to get a game to do X now than it did 10 years ago. of course with more capable systems X can be more things but thats the price.

i am concerned about the sustainability of the AAA sector to be honest. only 3 publishers can sustain it (QA, activision and ubisoft...ok and GTA....a publisher onto itself :P). it has to be a major sting for MS and sony since they can't do multiplat so more limited scope in audience. nintendo have done what they can so stem the tide for their developers (wiiu costs would only be roughly 1/2 thats of a PS4 game in terms of AAA development).

the biggest issue is that the AAA sector is not expanding to attract new audiences. if there is a bigger market for AAA games then the higher costs are not such a problem. but most of the market expansion in gaming at the moment is in the mobile sector (which is awful sad). how many PS4, X1 or wiiu owners never owned a console last gen or ever before?

so at the moment costs are going up, the market is not expanding, there is only so much the existing userbase can spend and all this is making AAA development riskier. 1million sales is not longer enough to consider a AAA title successful now. even 2 million is a bit shoddy...not really worth the sequal attempt.

in fairness MS and sony have done a lot of good things to try and make life easier for developers. the PS4 and X1 arent some custom built, alien monstrosity like the PS2 or 3. its sensible and practical hardware and the architecture is scalable so developers wont have to fight as much as they did last gen to get consoles to behave (looking at you PS3).

i know nintendo take flak for staying out of the hardware race...but this is why. there will come a point where even GTA cant sustain the cost of its own development if this spiral continues. at some point all 3 will have to think about how they are going to entice more people to buy a console and, for a lot of people, power and shiny graphics is not the answer.

to put it another way...3 of the most popular games on the PC are the sims, counter strike and minecraft. diablo 3 and starcraft can also be ranked up there as can WOW. none of these games require super top end hardware.

I would say that goes along with the gamers expectation I stated before.

It would truly suck if AAA games go away. They offer overall polish that other games just do not. There a type of innovation that only the AAA games are bring out right now. I am afraid that a large part of innovation in gaming will go away if AAA go away.

@wiouds: Specs? Price?

Sadly, some people won't buy games that don't offer online mode.

Now, companies are developing android and iOS games with less cost and sold it free. People are given the chance to play it a try and sometimes it comes out with a free hit.

It was a joke. I figure if you gullible to believe your statement than you are gullible enough to buy the computer you already have.

Imo games are always getting easier to make and so cheaper. I don't understand where you got that quote from in the thread tittle.

A number of AAA game publisher have made comments like that.

And it's from 3A entity? They are telling us that games development is not getting as fast as robot in the car industrie because of better tools and programs. Humm, sound like an escuse for rising the price.

They are saying with the better computers that gamers expect them to use the system to their most.

What lost revenue? If there was never any intention for the person to buy the game, there is no tangible loss.

Copyright infringement is a scapegoat for content-lite games people don't want to pay full price for. If companies made games people want to pay full price for, they'd sell more copies.

Just looking at the Canadian Origin store makes me sick. $79.99 CAD for a game like Star Wars: Battlefront that comes with two maps and a couple multiplayer modes? I remember paying that much for games that I still own from the 1990's that I still haven't done everything in.

that is the biggest nonsense that has been sold to the consumer by corporate lapdogs.

Consoles have royality fees, so the price is higher but the pc version costs the same. In australia games are super expensive, in the past it had to do with shipping now even games bought online are super expensive. Finally piracy barely makes a dent since most countries have stopped it with various blocking methods and lawsuits plus ressearch has shown that there isnt a loss because those pirates in poor countries wouldn't buy the game anyway.

You would think unpiratable games eg CONSOLES or other games with super drm would have lower prices if your argument was correct. You would think that sony who is making exlusives wouldnt need to price games 60 bucks since they are getting the royalities anyway, but they do.

In the end it happens because YOU buy them. Just like dlc.

In a nutshell, so many promotions,so much advertisement, mw2 costed 150 million i think and 100 of that was just advertisement, the best graphics the best voice actors, the most cinematics, those things cost not more gameplay.

That is a crazy ideal to believe. I find it hard to believe any company would pay that way.

@Cloud_imperium: pathetic isnt it? I read somehwere that a activision insider said the goal is to get people who dont even want the game to buy it with constant spamming of ads.

For what is worth black ops 2 campaign worthed a play through. Aside form that...i havent seen much good in cod in a long time, advanced warfare was heading in the right direction.

@Cloud_imperium said:

@wiouds said:

@dakan45 said:

@Cloud_imperium said:

They can start by not targeting "wider audiences" and stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and arranging review events.

In a nutshell, so many promotions,so much advertisement, mw2 costed 150 million i think and 100 of that was just advertisement, the best graphics the best voice actors, the most cinematics, those things cost not more gameplay.

So you believe companies are just foolishly throwing money away.

Back on to the topic, The 50 is much higher than the 15 million that it cost before.

@wiouds: what on earth are you reading?

mw2 costed 50 million to make and 200 to advertise.

Yeah,,, sick of those Destiny spam articles. It's like shoving something down our throats by force. Those 500 million dollars were reserved for a reason. Too bad the game is mediocre. If only they had spent more money on the game itself and less on spamming front page.

That right the Game development cost 50 million which I am looking at. since:

"Game development is significantly more expensive now" companies complain. How not to make it expensive

Easy

Stop hiring high profile name for voice acting

Stop spending so much on marketing and rather spend that money on the actual product. If the game is good it will sell all by itself and maybe start a huge franchise out of it. Look at the first souls games. Barely any marketing and turned into a multi-million franchise that started out of word of mouth alone. Minecraft is another exa ample

@wiouds: advertisement, best graphics, useless features too many cinematics voice acting motion capture, all those cost.

That is mixing Game development and marketing together.

As far as development is concerned, a lot of money can be saved if graphics were toned down a bit. For example, Drive Club has mountains in the background with thousands of trees that are all rendered in real time. Why? You will never drive up to those trees. Why spend the time to make them? Why spend the CPU power to render them?

Another thing with Drive Club is the hundreds of different types of trees and plants. Again, why? In a driving game where you're speeding down a track and barely noticing the environment, I find that to be waste. When I play, all I see is tree, tree, bush, tree, bush, bush whizzing by as I drive. I can't notice that each one of those was different. Some artist had to draw all those, and a programmer had to get them in the game. Waste of resources.

Lastly, with Drive Club, is the sky. A huge task for them to get real clouds and weather so that if it rains, the lighting from the sun reflects off the humidity in the air and breaks the light in realistic patterns. Again, why? It probably would have been cheaper to program a dozen or so weather patterns to cover almost any situation.

And I say, Drive Club did all that for what? For a 71 Metacritic score? So that no one bought it because they were waiting for the free PS Plus version? So that many people returned it because of it's unplayable online mode (at launch)?

I actually love Drive Club and paid for it. So I'm not knocking the game. But my point is, all that effort into the graphics and presentation, and I don't think it's a better game for it. I would have been just as happy with "pre-cooked" weather and lesser background details. And Evolution/Sony would have profited more from it.

TL;DR - Toning down background and supplemental graphics is the #1 way to lessen development costs. For all of Drive Club's bells and whistles, the game was not better because of it, other than when talking graphics.

Edit: Please note I'm talking about background graphics and such things that people don't really notice or spend time on. I do believe graphics need to be prioritized. In a game like DC, I certainly think the cars and tracks should look as good as can be.

We're talking a time where people goes over the entire graphic of a game with a fine tooth comb. Any weak point will then be scream about.

I am sure that other parts of the game are not that cheap as well.

Yea, I know - thanks Digital Foundry :/

It bothers me that people make a big deal about things that don't really affect the game, like shadows and that "this" version of the game has a bush that's not visible in "that" version, therefore "that" one is inferior. I mean, come on!

And although the whole game making process is expensive, I think graphics and everything involved in visuals, including animation and menus, are the more expensive part. It takes hundreds of artists to create assets, to build models, to add special effects, to create menus, 3D scanning, motion-capture, cinematography, sending teams to real life locations to research and take pictures. All these things are done to make visuals in a game.

What is a a big deal may be different from person to person. It may not matter to you but to someone else it could be a deal breaker. I known people that would quite a game because of some short cut in the back ground getting to them.

It comes down to one thing make the games not as good.

I like how AAA push all aspect of gaming at the same time.

Everything is costing more today. The people they hire cost more in salary, graphics takes a lot more times to do. They use motion capture, voice acting and all that that require time to set up and do. All things that Squaresoft didn't have to do when they made Final Fantasy VII .

Also AA games all isn't viable anymore. They existed until the PS2. But with the PS360 they adopted a single price model and thus you can't have AA anymore. Now it is starting to change as we see many games at various price point and with Canadian money they are a lot more expensive than ever.

Remember Midway ? they've been in trouble for more than a decade before they died during the PS3 life cycle as they were in dept more than ever because their game didn't sell because they were bad.

I am honestly a little puzzled by this thread.

(1) Want to know why Peter Dinklage was used in Destiny? That was because Game of Thrones is one of the most popular shows on television. How about Sean Bean in Oblivion? That was because the Lord of the Rings films raked in tons of money. Kevin Spacey? Instantly recognisable to the Netflix crowd.

My point is that celebrity appearances sell games. Publishers don't just give celebrities money for the hell of it...they invest in celebrity voice acting because they think that it'll lead to more sales. Animated films operate on the same premise - after Aladdin showed that celebrity voices lead to box office success, every new film has to star five recognisable film and television stars.

In short, celebrity voice acting should basically just be considered as a marketing cost. I'll explain why that's a good thing in a bit.

(2) Promotional deals on other products...is another obvious marketing cost. They put Halo imagery on a soft drink because teenage guys buy soft drinks, and teenage guys are the target audience for Halo.

So why are huge marketing costs a good thing? It's because they help ensure a return on the publisher's investment. It's as simple as that.

Look at Modern Warfare 2. That cost $50 million to develop, and $200 million to market. That sounds utterly crazy, until you consider that the game made over $1 billion. The marketing clearly worked, and the cost was absolutely justified.

At this point, you can't make an AAA title without a sizable budget for marketing. Game development is costly with or without the promotional aspects, and the best way to cover the risk of a $50 million game failing is to plaster ads on every train station and Mountain Dew in the world.

(3) The increased inclusion of multiplayer modes is a reaction to the used game market, and another way to cover the expensive costs of game development.

The secondhand market can have a big impact on the sales of a singleplayer game - unless your game is infinitely replayable (like Skyrim or Minecraft), chance are that people will trade it in, and others will buy it secondhand. The publishers effectively 'lose' a sale from this, so they combat it by providing exclusive promotional goodies for pre-ordering, incentives to hang on to the game (through multiplayer modes and season passes), and ways to earn more money further down the line (with new DLC releases over the next six months).

(4) HD graphics sell. People buy new consoles (and spend thousands on PCs) because they want better looking games. While cutting-edge graphics may be expensive, they cover themselves by making the game much easier to market.

So yeah, all of these costs? I would say that they are necessary evils to ensure these games get made in the first place.

@Planeforger: Although you make good points, the topic is what can be done to minimize development costs. I think we agree on all your points, but how can we reduce these costs? I, for one, am not willing to pay much more than the current prices for a game.

For me, graphics can take a small hit and I'd be fine. Like I explained in my post, I think a lot of time and money get spent on visuals that the player will either never see, or only see for a small period, not making it worth the time and attention that goes to them.