I see this argument a lot and it entirely glosses over the fact that the market is at least one order of magnitude larger, possibly two.
The cost of a game is the development, marketing, maintenance to some degree and in some cases physical production of the medium.
Past that it’s gravy.
You charge 70 in the 1990’s times 100,000 sales vs charging 70 now to a million sales.
It’s not like producing a car where you have a fixed unit cost, this is mostly copying already made data.
Yes, the tertiary costs can go up and the development costs can go up but the addressable market has also gone up significantly.
Nintendo specifically is absolutely not living release to release and is the worst possible example for this argument.
Not only do they not really do sales but they also have DLC all the way up the wazoo and frequently rerelease old games at current market prices, with minor tweaks.
They do not, however, lean all the way in to microtransactions, which is nice
I see this argument a lot and it entirely glosses over the fact that the market is at least one order of magnitude larger, possibly two.
The cost of a game is the development, marketing, maintenance to some degree and in some cases physical production of the medium.
Past that it’s gravy.
You charge 70 in the 1990’s times 100,000 sales vs charging 70 now to a million sales.
It’s not like producing a car where you have a fixed unit cost, this is mostly copying already made data.
Yes, the tertiary costs can go up and the development costs can go up but the addressable market has also gone up significantly.
Nintendo specifically is absolutely not living release to release and is the worst possible example for this argument.
Not only do they not really do sales but they also have DLC all the way up the wazoo and frequently rerelease old games at current market prices, with minor tweaks.
They do not, however, lean all the way in to microtransactions, which is nice