Raising Prices Won't Save The Gaming Industry
They are a pathetic gambit by the people responsible for the industry's problems to paper over their own mistakes.
Games shouldn’t cost 80 US dollars.
This should be pretty obvious, if only because one of the most unlikable people in the world is on board.
Games shouldn’t even cost 70 dollars. You can tell, because the vast majority of games that have launched at that price point have bombed, or slashed their price so quickly that they functionally were never at that price point to begin with. For every Call of Duty or Monster Hunter Wilds there’s a Dragon Age: Veilguard. Or a Forspoken. Or a Star Wars Outlaws. Or A Skull and Bones. Or a Callisto Protocol. Or a Dead Space Remake. Or a Saints’ Row 2022. Or an Immortals of Aveum. Or a Suicide Squad. Or a..
You get the picture (you don’t want to know how long I could keep going. It’s a lot.)
We know that a 70 dollar price point suppresses sales. Even the biggest games in the industry - ones that have maxed out their potential audience, or close to it - are affected by this. They still end up with higher revenue overall, but shedding parts of your audience for short-term gain is the exact sort of calculus that has eroded the entire foundation of the industry for the past decade.
Further still, we only know this holds true at 70 dollars. Every price increase will shed more people, and the more prices go up the more severe the effect will be. Even Nintendo seems to be hedging their bets on this one, considering the majority of Switch 2 units sold seem to be bundled with Mario Kart World.
Even if cranking prices wasn’t fiscal suicide for 90% of games, there’s one simple question.
Why the hell should I have to pay more? Who actually benefits? Other than the investors of the biggest companies in the world, who only by the most flimsy and narrow of technicalities should even be considered human beings.
This Won’t Save Devs
The idea that there is any correlation at all between how successful a game is and the fate of the people who made it is false, and anybody trying to claim otherwise is ignorant or attempting to deceive you. Full stop.
Profits didn’t stop Blizzard’s layoffs. Or Microsoft’s. Or Epic’s. Or EA’s. Or Sony’s. Or..
Again, you get the idea (and again, I could have gone on much longer.)
It’s time to stop pretending these giant corporations lay off employees due to any sort of economic reality rather than the simple cruelty of ‘they want to boost share prices at the end of the fiscal’. Oops, it’s cause of investors again! Man, they really seem to be a net negative on all of humanity, huh?
And when the story of every single major industry bomb over the past five years is ‘The developers begged and pleaded with leadership to be allowed to do anything other than this and were told no’ why on earth should anyone think the solution is to hand the people responsible MORE money?
The other oft-repeated idea is that higher prices would allow publishers and developers to make games without relying on crunch. There is a problem with this, however.
Crunch makes things take longer, not shorter.
People seem deeply resistant to this inarguable truth. It seems irrational so their brains can’t fully wrap around it. Even people who are otherwise intelligent and deeply oppose crunch can’t seem to consistently point out that crunch does. Not. Work. How work more not make more work done? How more time at work not equal more product? Brain no work good, corporation very good!
Crunch doesn’t work. It makes things worse. It simply does not work. This is known, by everyone who is not an idiot manager. Some studies show that less than 1 month of overtime can result in lower productivity than a normal schedule. And that’s purely on the ‘productivity’ side of things; speaking nothing to how it affects employee retention. If you take nothing else away from this; even if you think I’m completely full of shit and that games should cost 100 USD, take away that crunch doesn’t work.
Crunch is a product of mismanagement, stupid management, evil management or a combination of all three. Which leads into…
Executives are the problem.
Every major problem in the gaming industry is caused by delusional, incompetent, evil, or outright stupid management. Actually you could expand this to every single industry period, but let’s keep it a bit narrower than that.
Market forces did not demand any of the things currently bleeding the industry out and shuffling it towards a coffin. Delusional executives would rather bankrupt their companies than ever admit their ‘vibes’ were wrong. I could go into greater detail about how everyone in a position of power at every single large company is a completely useless moron, but Ed Zitron already did that.
Market forces didn’t demand Sony greenlight 12 service games, Executives did (more than half of which have now been canceled). Same with Arkane Austin, Rocksteady, Bioware, and every other storied dev that was hobbled or dissolved after being forced to make some shit they’ve never made before that goes against all their experience. Market forces didn’t demand Concord. Executives did.
Market forces didn’t demand every publisher begin spending three times as much on games consumers find functionally identical to ones from a decade ago. Executives who believed that ROI scaled linearly with investment did. Market forces didn’t demand talented studios make games wildly outside their wheelhouse, and then burn them and all their institutionalized knowledge to the ground when it didn’t work out. Executives. Did.
And that’s not even getting into how projects of the size being demanded are inherently difficult to manage and prone to falling into development hell, even before management directly makes things worse. If a single executive at any of these companies could read a Gantt chart, I’d be mildly shocked.
It’s galling that anyone can lie through their teeth about how all this waste and mismanagement was demanded by consumers when the most successful company in the industry right now is Nintendo, who have been rolling with 2015 phone hardware for the past eight years. If companies actually responded to market forces, uttering the phrase ‘live service game’ would have gotten you executed after 2023!
And once again, higher prices will not fix any of these problems! If everything goes as perfectly as the malignant narcissists running the industry hope, it will be a brief band-aid to the problems caused by years of unsustainable business practices and mismanagement. At worst, it’ll wipe out anybody who tries that isn’t named ‘Nintendo’ or ‘Rockstar’ and collapse the hole-ridden Jenga tower the gaming industry has become.
In the end, it all comes down to a simple question. One that should be asked to any executive or manager whenever they insist we need higher prices.
Why the hell should I have to pay more because YOU screwed up?
Kris Wolfheart is a loudmouth who posts on Bluesky and streams on Twitch. On Thursdays, you can find him on the live gaming podcast Big Think Dimension.