fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3260 ]

[ SECRET POST #3260 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3260 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

[Garden of Time]

__________________________________________________

03.

[Fargo, Karl x Sonny]

__________________________________________________

04.

[Elementary]

__________________________________________________

05.

[Top Chef]

__________________________________________________

06.

[The Pacific/HBO War]

__________________________________________________

07.

[Penn Jillette]

__________________________________________________

08.

[Final Fantasy X]

__________________________________________________

09.

[Shadow of Mordor]

__________________________________________________

10.

[Judging Amy]

__________________________________________________

11.

[The Lion Guard]

__________________________________________________

12.

(Borderlands)

__________________________________________________

13.

[Anziz Ansari, Master of None]

__________________________________________________

14.

[Pokemon]

__________________________________________________

15.

[Samurai Warriors Chronicles 3/Pokémon Conquest/Japanese history]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 067 secrets from Secret Submission Post #466.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - take it to comments ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

To be less facetious than my title: the game industry has been struggling. They're actually underselling games at those $60 prices people complain about. As in they're underpriced for what goes into them. It's kind of the same way with the animation industry. But people don't care so long as they get their fix, and then when someone suggests what's likely to be a cheaper alternative that doesn't see their workers even more overworked, they complain.

I think your title is pretty apt for your post, because I don't think you know how the game industry works. It's really funny you think gaming is such a struggling industry, when in reality it's a bigger industry than ever. And it's especially funny that you're asking people to like things when they have absolutely no obligation to do so. Entertainment is entertainment, if Square Enix makes a shitty remake, which will probably be the case, no one is going to go "aww well they worked so hard, I guess I'll spend $50 per episode just to be supportive".

It's like the housing bubble. It's too big to support itself. Just because something is big doesn't meant it's doing well. See the response below you to see exactly why they're underselling titles.

The gaming industry is bigger than ever, that doesn't mean it's more profitable than ever. Remember, net and gross are not the same thing.

There's a reason so many smaller studios have folded or been bought out by larger companies in the past ten years and why there's now only mega-studios and tiny indie projects left. The gaming industry is huge but companies are having a very hard time turning their sales into profits.

That is true, but mega games like Skyrim made over a billion dollars in sales revenue. Final Fantasy VII is one of the most well-known major games of all time, and Square Enix an enormous company - it's not like they are a tiny indie company taking risks on something that may or may nor sell. They could shove a piece of human excrement in a cartridge and slap "Final Fantasy VII" on it, and it would sell.

Skyrim also cost millions to make and is notoriously buggy and pretty much REQUIRES you to download AN UNOFFICIAL PATCH TO KEEP IT FROM BREAKING IRREPARABLY.

Do you really want to have that be FFVII?

Yeah. And Skyrim made an enormous, ENORMOUS profit. And yes, Square Enix also puts millions into its games, too, you realize?

I'm perfectly fine with a game of Skyrim's complexity being buggy on first release, it would be literally impossible to ever get the game on the shelves with a few testers searching for bugs before release. I have no complaint at all there. Of course, Skyrim is a lot more complicated of a game than FFVII is, which really isn't that complicated at all, so the expectation for bugs is not exactly on the same level.

Skyrim still has those bugs, though. They never fixed them. Fix your Bethesda boner.

What exactly is your point? They Skyrim... didn't actually make over a billion dollars (they did)? That the game wasn't enormous (it was)? The game is perfectly playable. If you're going to ask, yes, I support official patches fixing things, but so what? The very nature of a game like Skyrim is infinitely more complex than FFVII, again, which was the reason for the vast, vast majority of the bugs. So I'm not sure why you're bringing up bugs at all.

"pretty much REQUIRES you to download AN UNOFFICIAL PATCH TO KEEP IT FROM BREAKING IRREPARABLY."

Wtf are you talking about? I've had Skyrim since the date of release, have logged over 300 hours on it, and haven't downloaded this patch. It hasn't broken on me.

Yeah, costs for these major releases are astronomical compared to what they were when the original FF7 came out. The OG was one of the largest game projects ever, and it had over 300 people working on it. Nowadays triple-A titles have thousands of people working on them, and yet game prices haven't gone up to compensate.

Game companies scrape by on DLC and micro-transactions and cutting dev costs where they can by doing things like recycling assets. (That's why there's a new AC every year. It's cheap compared to developing new IPs.)

Yeah. And they can't recycle any assets for this remake, meaning they have to literally build a remake from the ground up while adding in more just to please fans who want it to be better and make it a fully fleshed-out world like is to be expected. That's going to take time and money. And when you get an airship with enough time to actually explore, then a minimal world map won't be enough. You can create the illusion of space and vastness easy when you're on foot, but when you're in the air that quickly goes away.

Have game prices at least adjusted for inflation?

I mean, I don't pay any attention at all to gaming as an industry, but if prices for AAA titles are the same in nominal dollars, that would mean they're actually cheaper in real dollars.

Not even vaguely. idr exactly what FF7 retailed for new, but I'm pretty sure it was $50 or $60. Certainly by the PS2 era new games were $60 for a big game, $20 for a small game like Katamari. And that hasn't changed at all.

And now with things like steam sales pushing prices even lower, videogames are the cheapest they've ever been.

No. Chrono Trigger and FFVI? Sold for $70~ each when they came out. They'd be, adjusted for inflation, over $100 dollars now.

And games have gotten more expensive to make.

No one is obligated to like or buy a piece of entertainment purely out of charity.

No, they aren't, but they don't get to whine about how "overpriced" something is when they know nothing about how it works in reality and how underpriced most games are nowadays.

What economic forces do you think are holding prices down?

Is it just a collective-action problem where no one wants to be the first one to jump and increase the price to 70 or 80, out of fear of the public reaction?

Actually, no. They do get to whine about the price.

The value of a product doesn't just come from what goes into making it. It comes from what people are willing to spend for it. If people have a problem with your price, telling them "but oh, we're not charging as much as we could or should" isn't gonna suddenly make it worth it to them, nor should it. Reduce your costs or make a better product.

And yet the same people bitch about retail workers not getting paid enough.

Do they? Is there really an exact one-to-one match?

Usually they do. It really bugs me. It's hypocritical to want retail workers to be paid a living wage while most people on these projects aren't making a good wage, either. :/

You left out part of the analysis: they're underselling them because that's what the market will bear. Inflation has happened, but wages have remained stagnant.

People can't afford to pay more than $60 for games. That's why the price has been stuck there for so long.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3260 ]

ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is

Re: ITT: People who literally don't know how the game industry works or how expensive it is