Everyone stay calm, this is a story about the economic realities of video games and how that affects companies and consumers.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 are both video games, and Larian’s publishing director says they were priced “below their value”, because the studio had “faith” it’d get back what it put in and cared about the costs us regular joes already face.
There is a bit of context surrounding this assertion ending up in a Tweet, and it’s as follows. Spurred by Star Wars Outlaws’ pricing, Michael Douse, the publishing director in question, said in another Tweet earlier this week that he believes: “Almost all games should cost more at a base level because the cost of making them (inflation, for one) is outpacing pricing trends.”
The developer added that he thinks “a game should be priced accordingly with its quality, breadth & depth”, and finished that thread by seemingly joking that studios are just waiting for GTA 6 to potentially reset the market a bit with a higher price that feels worth it before following suit.
Now, Douse has gone back at it with another thread about the issue, which includes a “brief economics lesson”, because Twitter is definitely the best medium for delivering those. Stating that the “bulk of development cost is salaries”, he argued that many studios and publishers react to inflation driving up the cost of paying developers, especially in the latter stages of development as things ramp up to release in a couple of different ways.
That’s where things like AI, which can be seen as easy cost-cutting measures, can come into play, and Douse argues that another consequence is many Triple-A studios attempting to “reduce risk” by following established trends with their games. Despite some “outliers”, the publishing director believes that that strategy is less likely to lead to “*better* games”.
Finally, Douse then outlined how he’s approached pricing Larian’s games in light of the issue, saying: “I priced both DOS2 and BG3 below their value because I care about people’s cost of living and had faith in our recoup”, and adding that the collector’s editions were “far below” what the studio could have set them at price-wise.
Now, let’s all breathe.
While this is clearly a complex situation that you can’t really examine in full via Twitter thread, Douse has clearly done a lot of thinking about it and has the useful perspective afforded by his position. There’s likely no easy answer to the conundrum that’ll ensure consumers who’re being squeezed by rising costs in all areas of their lives at the moment, developers who deserve to be compensated well for their hard work and afforded job security in a time when their industry is seeing mass layoffs on a pretty much monthly basis, and execs who need to look at spreadsheets and please shareholders can all be equally happy.
Then again, having to find a way to make all of this work is supposedly part of the reason those high up in the games industry are paid more than the developers actually making the games their companies sell, isn’t it?
