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[Ryuthrowsstuff]

@Shuck

it’s about scale of audience. Most games don’t have it.

Most anything doesn’t have it. The number of TV projects these days that hit a million viewers on any kind of reasonable time scale is pretty small. The number of films, especially non-American or non-studio films that sell that many tickets is miniscule.

Most bands will never cross that many ticket sales in an entire career. And a million record sales is a platinum record.

Hell it’s even the same with restaurants. The local Applebee’s franchise owner makes a thousand times what the neat but kinda pricey bistro down the street pulls in.

But the fact of the matter is that games are not a small business, and the audience for them overall is not a niche one.

Globally the gaming business is worth more than $130 billion dollars in revenue.

Nearly identical to the global film industry. And global box office last year was something like $41b. They’re both 10-20 billion bigger than TV.

I forget where I caught it but apparently more people regularly play video games as of a few years ago than have seen a movie in any given year in the same period. And recently it’s not been mobile games driving that.

Scale of audience excuses don’t really wash anymore. And any creative industry if you look at smaller and indy operations you don’t see the same layered revenues and ancillary streams. Or the amount of money that you do with the big players.

The video game industry’s problems are far more structural than that. There is a shit ton of money changing hands. But it doesn’t wind up with the devs, when it does it ends up in Randy Prichford’s pocket. Costs at bigger more stable companies seem to be out of control. And the entire standard work flow is based on exploiting labor to make it all possible.

But the business has largely caught up to movies on scale and probably eclipsed them on audience, the biggest twitch streamers have larger audience than the highest rated network shows. And as it stands you’re much better off these days launching that little indy game than producing an indy movie.

I know people who have tried both. The video game folks are consistently employed at upper middle class incomes after their projects didn’t make much of a splash. The indie movie folks it’s a mixed bag. One is a school librarian, another opened an escape room and now has 4 locations. Another ended up taking over a dying family business when options dried up. Saved that business though.

[Ratel]

@Ryuthrowsstuff

One thing that I think get’s over looked is costs and price. Standard price for a newly released game has always been about $60. If you average out across platforms and generations.

$60 in 1995 dollars is $101.85 now.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t see a new game retail for $60 until the mid noughties. Am I misremembering?

[Ryuthrowsstuff]

I’ve mostly been a PC guy. $55-65 was the going rate for a newly released game from the mid 90’s at least. I remember new console cartridges on recently released consoles being around the same. Some cheaper, some more expensive. Can’t recall but one of the systems was like $75 a cart at release. Depending on which brand, how recent etc. Apparently it all averaged out to $60 across the industry for a pretty long stretch of time. And that’s why companies target $60 and it became the default launch price.

But like I said especially on PC there was a really rigid, quick schedule of price drops. A month out $45, 2 to 3 $35, by 5 months $25-30. After that the budget bin for $20 or less. I remember console games being less quick about it but they were below the launch price by 3 or 4 months out.

I also remember being able to drop into Babages and get 3 recent games and a couple more from the budget bin for $50 or $60 bucks total. You just had to time it right and find a ride to the mall (over an hour). My console focused friends would do much the same, but they didn’t make out as well. And there were a lot more used games involved.

Anything unsuccessful, retailers would close out even faster. I got some truly trash games out of that budget bin for like $5.

So a “new” game could be had for less. But if you had to have it day one it could hurt.

[jerwin]

Cross reference your memories with this archive of computer gaming world…

http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=0&pub=0&id=500

(May 1994, revisiting an old SciFi game from 1992)

(Also, May 1994. I’m trying to get a price for 7th guest, which should come out around that time)

Note that the speech pack is extra. June 1994.

Perhaps dealers tended to apply huge discounts.

[jerwin]

ah, here we are

august 1993.

[the_borderer]

I would suggest the already mentioned Borderlands Series and Elder Scrolls series, and also suggest Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4. New Vegas is more RPG than the other two but they are all exploration FPSes.

@brenbart

Oh FFS! Stadia doesn’t support wireless controllers

Do you have a windows PC? How old is it?

Some of the recommended games are 10-15 years old and are not as graphically demanding as they were when they were released.

[Ryuthrowsstuff]

Well they never specified more or less than $60.

And for my part I’m talking averages. Prices were very much less consistent then they are now.

@jerwin

Perhaps dealers tended to apply huge discounts

To my memory, at least with PC games, it wasn’t retailers so much as distributors.

My friends and I were nerdy little shits and subscribed to a bunch of different PC gaming magazines at the time. At least one of them would publish price listings. Which games were moving to what price on what date that month. It’s part of how you knew to go to the mall.

From what I gather it was about pushing through production runs. Producing software at the time being much like publishing anything. You’d have a “printing” of x copies ordered up by a distributor and you wouldn’t make more till those distributors wanted more. If they didn’t it went out of print. That distributor wanted to push through it as fast as possible so the price steadily dropped.

And there were a lot of local retailers in smaller towns that just didn’t play that game. I remember our local computer shop regularly charged over $100 for any and all games. Even for very old ones.

I can remember popping in a few times in college as that had left them with a lot of very old stuff hanging around. The thought was it might be a decent place to pick up harder to find retro stuff. Still charging $120 for 15 year old games. Ones that were $20 on Ebay.

[Shuck]

@Ryuthrowsstuff

Most anything doesn’t have it.

Right, that’s my point - the audience for most individual games, like other media, isn’t big enough to support merchandising as a meaningful revenue stream. (That’s what I meant by “scale of audience” - the audience for a particular piece of media.) Though it’s not just about audience size. Bands tend to be an exception, because people feel passionately about them. Similarly, some games/movies/tv shows lend themselves to merchandising more than others.

@Ryuthrowsstuff

Nearly identical to the global film industry.

The first time I read that claim was many years ago, and it was totally an apples-to-oranges comparison. They compared movie ticket sales (which is an increasingly small fraction of film industry revenue) to all game hardware, software and even development middleware revenue. I suspect that’s still the case, to some degree in the comparisons, because I’d be very much willing to be that the film industry, especially globally, is bigger than the game industry. (Claiming that people have seen no movies in a year obviously refers to the theater. But that’s not really significant anymore. I watch multiple movies each week but haven’t been to a theater in a decade at least.) The game industry just doesn’t have that much money floating around in it. The number of rich game studio or publisher heads pales in comparison to the number of rich movie studio executives. The big expenditure for AAA publishers is in marketing. I.e. all that money is going to television (ads). The fact that the game industry is stuck with sales (and real money transactions) as its sole revenue stream, vs. the movie industry’s ticket sales and DVDs, VOD, tv rights, streaming, etc. makes a difference.

@Ryuthrowsstuff

And as it stands you’re much better off these days launching that little indy game than producing an indy movie.

For game developers employed at independent studios, income can be decent (not that I’ve experienced it), but studio shut downs are frequent. (I once worked for three studios in two years, thanks to closures. I think a friend of mine managed more than that for a while.) The average studio workers spends a good amount of time unemployed without benefits (and often with owed salary that they never get); being consistently employed requires a great deal of good luck (or a highly specific, in-demand skill set).

Most game development now is being done outside studios now, though. The average indie (as in not employed by a studio) game developer’s income puts them well below the poverty line. As the average indie game’s first year of sales is now $16,000 on average. (For a game that took more than one person-year to make.) For most indie developers, game development is functionally a hobby. The barrier to entry for game development has disappeared thanks to free tools, so there are far more game developers than can be supported by sales, and again, there are more ways to recover costs for movies than games.

@Ratel

I’m pretty sure I didn’t see a new game retail for $60 until the mid noughties

There were $60 to $80 console games even in the late '80s, though they were relatively rare.

[Ryuthrowsstuff]

@Shuck

They compared movie ticket sales

The numbers I quoted were total revenue for 2018 from Wikipedia, that’s why I quoted the box office for the past year as well. Dollars flowing through the door of companies in those industries, regardless of what they do. Such numbers tend to include everything from the box office to projection manufacturers to film processing.

Fact of the matter that by any metric the games business is as large as any other major entertainment industry. By the metric of audience size they’re likely to be ahead. It’s not a trick to include hardware. That how you track the economic size of these things.

@Shuck

industry is stuck with sales

Books, magazines, radio just has ads, theater really has exhibition. What you’re describing about the film industry is all technically “sales” too. And it’s all normal. There’s nothing especially unique about the games industry.

Meanwhile in film and TV the steaming we’re talking about has become so important because of rapidly shrinking revenue from those other sources. The box office numbers are healthy currently down to a handful of big event movies and interest in Asia, but actual theater attendance has collapsed in the last 30 years. Butts in seats are lacking. In television ad rates and sales have shrunk rapidly as the audience has shifted elsewhere (including to games). And ad rates for web ads are too low to replace that revenue. Subscription and license fees from paid streaming services are much smaller. Such that that online audience can be much, much larger than the traditional one. But still generate less income.

More over film and TV underwent a huge contraction in the 00’s with 10’s of thousands of jobs going away and never coming back. The average worker in the industry is a freelancer making $40kish a year. Mean salary for a network TV writer is just $60k. I went through that particular wringer and that’s why I currently sell beer, despite some TV credits and good connections. I know a guy who went from editing episodes of Person of Interest and national campaign commercials to owning an oyster farm. Because even for him there was and still isn’t any work.

90% of independent films never see a theatrical release even at a single theater. And for those that do the average take is in the $5000 range.

Nothing your really describing to me sounds too much different than any other media business. None of it demonstrates that gaming is small audience. And even zeroing in “indy indy indy” it sounds pretty decent compared to my own experience in production. Cause for the most part you won’t even find an indy production company to work for these days, none the less three in two years. And independent television never really exisited in the first place.

The issues there just aren’t one of scale compared to other media. Just as the problems in the music business aren’t down to lack of audience or revenue streams.

@Shuck

For game developers employed at independent studios, income can be decent

What i meant about that was more that those stints at an indy studio, well paid or not. Tended to lead directly to gainful employment elsewhere, in gaming or not. With far, far, far more regularity than any media business. The default situation of most A/V production staff, and almost all creatives is unemployment with occasional freelance gigs. The only thing like regular employment is corporate communications. Writers and artists of any sort it’s self employment where media jobs (including for games) are a part of the overall hustle.

[Ratel]

Why Do All New Video Games Cost Exactly $59.99?

In the early 2000s, PS2, original Xbox, and Gamecube games cost a uniform $50. When the next generation of consoles was introduced, licensing fees increased by an average of about $10, so companies simply tacked the additional cost onto what they previously had been charging.

[Shuck]

@Ryuthrowsstuff

It’s not a trick to include hardware

Sure, but the comparisons I’d seen took into account game hardware (which people were also using to play movies on at the time), but not DVD/Bluray players (much less the vast majority of revenue streams) for the film industry. The game industry has grown a lot since then, but I’m still skeptical of the numbers because previous comparisons were so obviously disingenuous.

@Ryuthrowsstuff

Books, magazines, radio just has ads, theater really has exhibition.

Which makes them all pretty fragile when their source of revenue dries up. My point was just that gaming wants secondary revenue streams, like the movie industry has, so that when one dries up (game sales do decline, sometimes), there are alternatives. Just as movie tickets sales have declined, other streams have increased.

@Ryuthrowsstuff

those stints at an indy studio, well paid or not. Tended to lead directly to gainful employment elsewhere, in gaming or not

Very much depends on what one does. For a programmer, it’s very easy to find work elsewhere. I know a number of game developers, however, who have worked in the industry for a long time and feel pretty trapped because their skills don’t transfer to anything else.

[Ryuthrowsstuff]

@Shuck

Sure, but the comparisons I’d seen took into account game hardware

And like I said that film industry number takes account of shit like popcorn sales, you aren’t skeptical of the film industry numbers because they cover the stoned teen handing you your ticket sales. These things aren’t totally divorced either. You’re taking a very limited look at the games industry as just devs, and from the prospective of indy devs.

But interesting quirk here. One of the few expanding aspects of film and television, one of the few fields there with a growing number of jobs, rising wages, and serious job stability. Is digital effects. The companies that do that work are not studios or production companies, but 3rd parties doing contract work.

And often those companies also do contract work for games. Sometimes they’re game companies. I’ve seen Take 2 Interactive listed in the credits of films. A lot of audio studios now do the bulk of their work for game voice overs. And whether motion capture is done for Star Wars or Read Dead, it’s often the same companies doing it.

To the extent that there’s a reason to be skeptical of numbers I think it’s honestly in this direction. If you look at count of jobs provided/created by the video game business. They tend to exclusively quote publishers, often not even devs. But the industry as a whole is a hell of a lot broader than that (and yes hardware counts).

If you recall the friend I mentioned who took over and saved a family business. It was a bindery and paper goods company. He did that by getting into specialty packaging for DVDs. These days that aspect is mostly dead. But they do a shit ton of higher end boxes for physical copies of games, game merch etc. All for smaller operations and short runs.

@Shuck

My point was just that gaming wants secondary revenue streams,

Which is valid. But you have a very grass is always greener look at other media industries. A lot of what your describing is just “entertainment business”. It exists to the exact same extent in other ends of it, always has, and represents a shifting target of how the fuck to get paid for this sort of thing. The particular issues in any given industry are unique to that industry. But nothing you’ve pointed out, true as it is, sounds characteristically different than anywhere else.

@Shuck

. Just as movie tickets sales have declined, other streams have increased.

Those other streams often haven’t increased dollar wise, or provide far, far less income than they replace. To a large extent it is replacement, not an add on, and in most of these businesses people are scrambling to cobble together a combination that’ll make it stable. You can look at Music streaming, where even the artists at the top of the global charts typically pull down a pittance in actual fees. The reasons for that are complicated. But look at whatever industry right now and what you’ll see is traditional revenue streams decreasing. While new revenue streams either never materialize, or just aren’t able to offset. Often because those new revenue streams come from new middle men, and the “disruption” they’re predicated on being focused on capturing a bigger piece than the previous middle men. Or cutting out workers.

Games wise from what I’ve seen sales, the traditional revenue stream. are increasing. But the economies of it are eroding for other reasons. Additional revenue streams would help with that. Though less so than fixing the structural problems. I just keep hearing from people in the games business that such and such over in film, or radio or publishing is so much more money and it could solve the problem. But having seen it first hand, it’s sure as shit not solving the problem for film or radio or publishing.

@Shuck

I know a number of game developers, however, who have worked in the industry for a long time and feel pretty trapped because their skills don’t transfer to anything else.

Welcome to jobs. Whatever industry you’re in, a writers job skills transfer to fewer places than a programmer or an HR guy (remember game companies need HR people, book keepers etc). I know doctors who haven’t managed to maintain employment as doctors. But just anecdotally. I don’t see too many people who wash out of the games industry spending the next decade of their life waiting tables. And I’ve worked at restaurants where the entire staff were former media people. I’ve worked at production companies where most of the employees also worked in restaurants.

[Ratel]

So for the hell of it, I tried Stadia out on my bottom-of-the-line Surface Book 2, with Destiny 2. Damned if it doesn’t work. I had some mouse issues (apparently that often requires a little configuration), and of course the game is designed for something a little larger than 12.5" or whatever this screen is, but otherwise it all ran perfectly smoothly.

That game list is a killer, though. Destiny 2 (probably not my cup of tea) was free for the deal, but otherwise $10/month, and if I wanted to dig around for something I might prefer it was back to retail prices. My next step will be to see if I could get it to play on a second monitor. If that worked, then you’re basically paying $10/month to have a perpetually top-of-the-line gaming rig, which theoretically is nice when all you can afford is an extremely modest laptop (with a good monitor). So potentially you’re talking about replacing most of the cost of high-end PC gaming, not just console replacement (assuming you have a system already).

I guess when I do the math, I think it probably washes out: in the past I’ve always put together a nice system for about $1200 (monitor is separate), and you typically start falling shy of the top-level games in about 3 years, which is about $10 a month. Down side to the service model is with your own system you also have a nice machine for doing non-gaming activities. Also I’ve often been able to buy a few years with a modest outlay on a few component upgrades.

I’ll have to see if I can try out the NVidia thing as well.