Comment by ampersandrew@lemmy.world on V Rising has launched out of Early Access!

$35 is a deal breaker? Your financial situation is your financial situation, but compared to the rest of the industry, this is cheap.

“Compared to the rest of the industry” is damning with faint praise.

I’d say most games are maybe worth $20, more only for the ones filled with content that you can replay many times.

Fortunately there are enough people who value them more than you, because most games, even moderately budgeted ones, wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves at that price.

“Moderately budgeted” compared to what? Modern AAA game budgets have absolutely exploded and are not sustainable, turning game dev cycles into 5+ year marathons and giving it Hollywood Syndrome where every game needs to be a blockbuster to be considered a success and no risks are able to be taken because of the massive investment each project requires. Do you think that’s sustainable? Or do you think that perhaps things have gone out of control when a $90 price point is being floated, even in conjunction with money printing anti-consumer features like lootboxes?

Let’s say that including benefits, a developer’s salary is about $100k. Maybe a small team of 8 people worked on a game like The Thaumaturge for 3 years. Before you even factor in contract work like voice acting, that would put the development budget at $2.4M. If the game cost $20, they’d have to sell about 120k copies to break even on that investment, which is far from guaranteed. By pricing the game at $35, their break even point is nearly half of that. This is a moderately budgeted game, not a AAA game with microtransactions.

Even an experienced team like Mimimi games, who made smart development choices by iterating on what they built before to keep costs down, releasing critical successes several times in a row, ended up closing down because the money coming in was too tight. Their games ranged from $30-$50 and had every sale, bundle, giveaway, and promotional opportunity you could think of.

If the game cost $20, they’d have to sell about 120k copies to break even on that Investment,

Far more actually. You have to deduct taxes, steam’s cut etc. from those 20$.

That’s a movie ticket and a snack. Most games offer far more (or at least longer) entertainment than that. Even games I won’t finish.

The average movie isnt worth ticket price either IMO, and length certainly doesn’t equal quality.

And I’d certainly say “most games” are absolutely not worth it, as the majority of games are simply lacking in terms of inspiration, innovation, compelling gameplay or story, or anything else to set it apart and give me a reason to play.

The average movie isnt worth ticket price either

The worth of a thing is determined by what people will pay for it.

length certainly doesn’t equal quality.

For any single product that’s true, statistically it makes the two classes (games and movies) comparable.

I don’t think you’ll earnestly want to argue that 1 hour of movie entertainment is in general worth multiple hours of gaming entertainment. There are good and bad movies and games, but if you compare those of similar quality, the fact stands that the game will give you more for your money. Whether you want more of course depends on you - I gather that gaming doesn’t seem to really entertain you for the most part.

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V Rising has launched out of Early Access!(steamcommunity.com)

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