High Price Scare Tactics

GamesIndustry.biz has comments from Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, stating that he considers the recent talk about sky high game and console prices nothing but scare tactics on the part of large publishers. From the article: "'I guess they just don't have productive tools like we have,' he went on to suggest."

worth it

[FzArEkTaH]

Hardware is expensive and good developers are expensive - also gaming is growing at such a rapid rate, even with all the expense, so they know that it will sell, and if it's a good game, well worth it in my eyes.

MMORPGs are replacing them anyways

[QuantumG]

The biggest factor preventing lots of people from playing a MMORPG is cost. Many more people try out "free trials" than go on to pay the subscription fee. Companies see a MMORPG as a big cash cow and try to keep the amount of actual development done on the game to a minimum.

Open Source MMORPG projects are starting to put control back into the hands of the RPG community. Like MUDs before them, MMORPGs will one day be run by a community of volunteers. If players choose to pay those volunteers then all the better.

The biggest thing holding this back is the creation of art: maps, character models, items, 2d graphics. There's a new project LessShift [freeartfoundation.org] to develop this art. Will you help?

Re:Even higher?

[chris_mahan]

Nah,

You gotta buy the game at that price.

If good games cost less, they would already cost less. The market is already adjusted to the optimum price to support the greatest numebr of users and the industry.

Kismet... wow!

[nacturation]

Everyone's commenting on the cost issue, but the full interview [gamesindustry.biz] has some really great stuff about the Unreal 3 engine. Here's a snippet regarding Kismet, the scripting environment within the engine:

I have a great quote from one of our team, actually, which describes it perfectly. He's one of our level designers who posted on a private development forum, describing what his working life is like now with Kismet.

They were talking about Unreal Engine 3, and what he said was; "Nothing to do with graphics actually - the tools just ooze creative inspiration. I've never scripted or coded in my life, but our visual scripting - which I know is not an entirely new concept - is a fucking blast to work with. I've created levels with entire mini-games in them, AI behaviours, damage systems depicting various stun events and healing, cinematics, bizarre control schemes, even physically rolling dice telling me totals based on the angle of the surfaces facing upright when the object's velocity reaches zero, which I check every 0.5 seconds."

"I've even coded a random level generator and I've needed virtually no interaction with anyone on the code side to make this work. We've had level designers implementing a fighting game in a level, a driving game with chase cam and effects, targeting systems and etc, with incredibly low learning curve. You could walk into a room in a deathmatch level and suddenly find yourself in the middle of a Dance Dance Revolution mini-game."

"Just last week a potential licensee was in-house, and described the game they wanted to build and how one of their critical game mechanics was going to work. Literally within five minutes they looked over my shoulder, I'd built that core dynamic into a level of our game. The demo went incredibly well to say the least. "

"Typically, I'll sit down with a new recruit, a designer with no scripting experience, for about two hours, and show them the basics of Kismet - how triggers work, characters, toggles, cinematic systems, conditions, variables and so on. Then I'll give them about a day to screw around with it. Within a day I'll see some absurd crap" ... Ah, I'm replacing swear words here! [laughs] "...happening in their levels that would have been an absolute nightmare to get going otherwise, even if they could describe what they were actually looking for to a programmer - and that communication would no doubt affect the outcome anyway."

"The bottom line is that engine tools dramatically affect your creative process, and our engine has been designed with far more in mind than just pretty shadows."

With all the new games requiring a dozen programmers or so, will technologies like this bring back the concept of the one or two person commercial game? Artwork is obviously still a major hurdle, but there are many places to purchase models if you need to. And, finally, anyone know if this will be available for mod developers with the next Unreal game, or only to those who fork over the big bucks for an engine license?

The competition

[b1t r0t]

If they do this, they'll have a lot of competition from the used games market. It's not just mega-collectors like me with 2000+ games for a couple dozen systems who won't pay high prices (I wait until new games go down in price anyhow), but the average punter who heads down to the used games shop and has lots of low-priced used games to choose from. Not that everybody will go for it, but a lot will.

After all, what do you think Steam is all about? It's about killing the used games market, though too little and too late.

Re:Trip Hawkins Mows My Lawn

[Some_Llama]

"If more people waited 6-12 months to purchase a game, the length of time before the publishers dropped the price would just increase. You should be encouraging fewer people to wait 6-12 months. The more people who buy the game on the first day it is released, the faster the publisher will drop the price. "

Wrong, doom3 dropped their price in less than 6 months, halflife 2 is still going for 60+, they both sold about the same in the first few weeks/months.

"Waiting will merely lead to the company waiting longer because their research shows the game needs to sell X number of copies before they will lower the price."

No waiting will ensure that they go broke if noone buys the game at their artificially inflated 50+ dollar price...

Do the math, 1 million games sold at 50 bucks, or 5 million sold at 20-30 dollars, which generates more profit?

When you make the games affordable so anyone can buy them you will reduce piracy and generate bigger interest in the game.. anyone remember this little title called Serious Sam? How about it's sequel...

----------------
I consider myself a liberal, does that count?

EA and others can't really expect this...

[silentbobdp]

...when I know of at least one game specialty store that's getting ready to add a "value" section on their walls EXCLUSIVELY of new titles 19.99 and under.

Further, the prices for almost all the non-EA PSP launch titles have backed down from 50$ to 40$.

The writing is on the wall and game prices are going down.

Re:Kismet... wow!

[KDR_11k]

Easier coding reduces the chance of bugs and therefore shortens both coding and testing time. Modelling might get more complex but the programs constantly get better as well. Just as normalmaps threaten to skyrocket dev costs ZBrush 2 appears on the scene and speeds organic hipoly modeling up by a huge factor. Unlike coding, which doesn't see advances very often, especially not ones avaiable to everyone at reasonable prices (say what you will but 2k for an app is still much lower than 200k for an engine), modeling advances at a steady pace. Texturing becomes easier with normalmaps since the bulk of the detail is now in the highpoly geometry. And besides, if you think modeling is painful and tedious work you're probably not someone who should do that as a job.

scalability and the cost of content

[Bobtree]

The AAA-title end of the game industry is rapidly approaching a cost/benefit barrier that current development practices will not be able to surmount.

Two facts are primarily responsible:

1 - Reinventing game engine technology from scratch for every title is cost prohibitive and slow.

"In the limit, all graphics rendering technologies tend to approximate ray-tracing [+ radiosity, etc]" -Unknown

2 - Recreating game content (art and code assets) to take advantage of improving technology becomes exponentionally more expensive as we approach the asymptotic limits of "perfect" technical fidelity, and simultaneously offers diminishing payoffs.

"They're selling us the same games year after year, with small incremental content updates" -any sports game fan

Therefore, in the future, game technology needs to scale up/down freely with hardware capability and adapt "finalized" content to an appropriate level through pre/dynamic simplification or procedural/simulated detail increase.

This is taking place to some extent already, with limited reuse and extension of game technology platforms and content in similar games and sequels (Unreal, Doom, Half-Life, etc), but the industry remains short-sighted and fails to address to-the-limit scalability.

Current content and platforms are also overwhemlingly monolithic, and there's no hard limiting technical reason why there cannot be increasing modularity.

Imaging playing a game using Doom's graphics technology, Enemy Territory's gameplay, Unreal's networking & mods, Half-Life's physics system, TeamSpeak's voice technology, and Xfire's buddy-list, or any such combination as you like, on any platform.

Sigh. I hope I'm not too old and disabled to play games when computing technology finally grows up.