10 Biggest Dangers To Gaming Right Now (From A Dev's Perspective)
8. That'll Be £99.99, Please (Exploding Costs)
Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to cost somewhere in the region of $2 billion. Two BILLION dollars. Can you even conceive of two billion dollars?
Imagine two billion labradors. That’s too many labradors.
But just to put that into perspective - if every copy of GTA 6 was sold for $70, that’s like… twenty-eight and a half million copies they need to sell to break even!
Imagine twenty-eight and a half million labradors. That’s still too many labradors.
When you put it that way, it makes sense why games now cost seventy smackeroos, with talks of them even increasing to one hundred. But… do we really need them to?
With AAA games from the bigger publishers now costing hundreds of millions of dollars to stay competitive amidst their contemporaries, it seems like the only way is up from here - the budgets go up, so the prices go up, too. But in a global recession, with the real-world cost increasing seemingly exponentially, analysts have noticed an uptick in gamers instead choosing smaller indie titles, and a significant boost to the until-recently-absent AA-tier (offering a middle quality-to-price bracket).
The people have spoken - like Goldilocks, we like our games not too small, nor too big. And submerged in porridge, or something.
Sorry, I don’t know the story of Goldilocks.