Yes. (To clarify, I consider any AAA game who’s base price is above $60 USD to be too expensive).
Development tools are easier than ever to use. Video games make more profit now than they ever did before, and that has nothing to do with the price. The number of people playing games has increased exponentially.
Development team sizes have become bloated and publishers are spending way too much on marketing rather than actually paying the developers well. Executives are siphoning more and more money to pay themselves day by day.
By all means, the prices of games should be going down. But with companies expecting growth year after year, they can only make so many cuts before they look to increase the price of games. But the quality keeps going down for most studios because theyre not getting paid properly according to the profit they’re making.
Also considering that gameplay systems are becoming more simple instead of more complex, at least on AAA games anyways, the armies of devs seems to be mostly the artists making the photorealistic graphics.
I have experience in game dev and I can absolutely tell you that the large majority of work done for most games is asset creation. Models, textures, sound, etc. The actual programming and writing usually take less than 50% combined of total development time.
Yes. (To clarify, I consider any AAA game who’s base price is above $60 USD to be too expensive).
Development tools are easier than ever to use. Video games make more profit now than they ever did before, and that has nothing to do with the price. The number of people playing games has increased exponentially.
Development team sizes have become bloated and publishers are spending way too much on marketing rather than actually paying the developers well. Executives are siphoning more and more money to pay themselves day by day.
By all means, the prices of games should be going down. But with companies expecting growth year after year, they can only make so many cuts before they look to increase the price of games. But the quality keeps going down for most studios because theyre not getting paid properly according to the profit they’re making.
Also considering that gameplay systems are becoming more simple instead of more complex, at least on AAA games anyways, the armies of devs seems to be mostly the artists making the photorealistic graphics.
I have experience in game dev and I can absolutely tell you that the large majority of work done for most games is asset creation. Models, textures, sound, etc. The actual programming and writing usually take less than 50% combined of total development time.