Topic: PlayStation Plus | OT |

@Octane Very good point - I did a little reading and numbers are hard to come by. Publishers don't announce budgets very well. In real terms, I've seen articles on Kotaku showing a general year on year rise on budgets but then Wikipedia has a list where it is adjusted for inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_ga... and you can see that games like FFVII make the list in comparison.

You can also see that marketing is way more than development costs on this list. Destiny is an interesting one in that they built that game concept from ground up, plus infrastructure costs etc. That had a troubled development in a lot of ways but I guarantee that the development costs for Destiny 2 were a lot less as it is practically the same game.

You are right about the base price not rising. Publishers want to make the base game as enticing as possible so they can see you extra content because, as I said, extra content is cheaper to produce and far more profitable. If you spend, say $1 dollar on a skin for a game, that is actually 1.67% of the base game and the cost to develop is minimal. Publishers don't want to raise prices and put you off buying, they want to keep it low to get you hooked and sell you profitable content.

@Rudy_Manchego I doubt that list is complete though, unless Horizon and Uncharted had a combined development and marketing budget of less than $50m. In that case, well done, I guess. But indeed, the inclusion of games like FFVII is interesting, which shows me that expensive games have always existed. At least as long as 3D games have been around. And the most expensive game according to that list came out nearly a decade ago. But again, I wonder how accurate it is, since a game like Battlefront didn't make the list either.

Cinemablend did an article on Battlefront (2015), and according to them, the development budget was around $50m, with another $100m alone for the license (but I'm not sure if they pay per game, or just for the 10 years they have the rights). Even if you add another $100m for marketing (Cinemablend put the estimate at $50m), they have made that money back several times over, with at least 12 million copies sold on PS4 and Xbox alone, and that's without the digital copies on consoles and PC.

But as @BAMozzy brought up earlier, it's kinda interesting that the games that sell a guaranteed 10 million copies, and are guaranteed to be profitable, are the same games that ''need'' the micro-transactions on top of it all.

And that's why I'm a bit wary of it all, something smells fishy. There's no transparency, and numbers don't seem to add up.

@Rudy_Manchego 1 million copies would be $16m in that case! I know Steam takes a 30% cut, or so I've heard. So a publisher makes around $40m for every million copies sold on Steam. If you buy an EA game from their own online store, they obviously get 100%. That's why the move from physical to digital (16-20% to 100%) means publishers can double their income several times over without having to do a lot at all. That's why everyone's pushing for digital, to work the retailer out of the equation. Although street presence is still very important. Digital can be anywhere from 20% up to 50%. For example, I believe Destiny 2 sold more digital copies than physical copies.

Anyway, 40m+ budgets for development alone are quite big, and not every game needs it. So I doubt that's the norm.

@Octane Ha ha will rewrite that as my maths was so off!

What also isn't being mentioned - re cost of games, is that we on consoles already pay more for exactly the same game as the PC version. We are essentially paying a premium already for playing on the consoles, that little extra maybe for some person or two to port the game over and optimise it for our platform as PCgamers have to do their own optimising by playing with the settings to get it to run at the standard they want (or will settle with).

It seems that the majority of games cost less than £100m inc their Advertising budget. Tomb Raider (the first) is around £100m according to that wiki list and despite selling only 4m copies, was considered Profitable by the end of 2013 - before they re-released the difinitive edition! It since gone on to sell more than 11m copies - I assume therefore that the 7m additional copies are pure profit...

The Witcher 3 cost around 46m to make with nearly the same budget going on Advertising yet made 63m in the first half of 2015 alone - before sales of DLC or GotY editions....

As for costs, Shenmue 3 and Final Fantasy 7 are both games made in the 90's - that's 18-20yrs ago and both in the list as some of the most expensive games ever made - more expensive than a game like the Witcher 3 for example. FF7 is the 3rd game on this list behind CoD:MW2 and GTAv (two games that were extremely profitable).

Of course that list isn't up to date and all inclusive but if you were to look at the biggest selling games in recent years, most of them will have some form of micro-transactional content. CoD has had Micro-transactions in the past 3-4yet always ends up as one of the biggest selling games - always profitable despite maybe falling numbers in sales but it still often has the biggest opening weekend of any media. EA also claim that Mass Effect Andromeda was a financial success yet didn't sell in big numbers. In EA’s financials, Mass Effect: Andromeda is held up as the title that drove the company’s financials, referenced multiple times as a significant factor in generating revenue. That game was rumoured to cost 40m - a similar figure we see in games, not inc Advertising costs - but it seems that 2m is enough to start turning a profit. Maybe not as much 'profit' as publishers may want or have 'predicted' to their 'share holders' but its still 'Profit'.

@KratosMD I am fine with the cessation of PS3 offerings, but I had hoped we would still get Vita titles. However, if they offer enough PS4 games that cross-buy with Vita, then I’m fine with it.

Im gonna be honest, I keep forgetting to download the games on vita. Im literally using it in extreme circumstances now like Im away with work (very rare) or I spend the night at my mums (1/2 times a year). So for me I cant see it affecting me too much.

While I will miss Vita games, at the end of the day they are drying up and won't make a big difference. As long as they remain available for download on those I have already added, I think I can live with it.

I just cancelled my PS Plus membership, for the first time since I joined back when it started.

It's great we are getting games like Bloodborne and R&C now for people who haven't already got them but if this is the way it's going I'd rather wait and see and buy membership on a monthly basis.

I don't plan on using online play much now that Destiny has gone all the way down the shi**er, and i won't get round to Monster Hunter for a while yet.

So what's left? The discounts. These are pretty great, but I'm buying less on the store these days as I'm trying to make the most of the games I buy instead of jumping through releases like I got into the habit of last year.

So that's where I'm at - seems a shame in a way. A few years ago I'd have said it's rediculous to own a PS4 and not have a Plus membership.

@KratosMD yeah, the games this month are awesome don't get me wrong, but that's why I've already owned them for 2-3 years lol. I'd much rather take new (good) indies and smaller games over what I already have. But to be fair good indie releases are becoming fewer and fewer.

Still hopefully some gems I missed will come through down the line.

@kyleforrester87 The end of an era.
Well, I can see where you’re coming from as far as I don’t play online much, but I like the convenience of constant access to my IGC. Weirdly, I don’t access it but sporadically, but it’s comforting to know if I ever can’t find anything to play in my backlog of 20-30 physical and digital games I own, then I have 100 games in the IGC cloud I can download and play at anytime. Yeah, silly, I know. Doesn’t happen real often. So right now I’ve basically been paying $4 a month to play Fez a couple times a month 🤔
And I will download and start Bloodborne this month, since it is the hot topic now and it’s almost like a second release of the game with all us newbies playing for the first time.

3 months in and so far this year I picked up:
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness & Rime.

I think that's roughly half of the yearly membership fee payed for via the IGC.

Think I've still got ~18 months left. I thought about stacking up another year due to the current sale, but the service has lost a bit of value for me with the Vita offerings being faded out.
Think I'll top up the next time it falls to <£35.

@RogerRoger it kind of feels like I'm betraying myself not being a member 😂 But really the service is just gearing itself toward a different type of gamer now, so it doesn't make sense for me to have active membership.

@kyleforrester87 Yeah the indie scene has really gone down the swanny lately. It was a golden age a few years ago and it was fun while it lasted.

@themcnoisy to be fair there are some great indies like Crossing Souls and Celeste (both released this year). Problem is a lot of naff is distracting from the great ones.

Yeah I still think the indie scene is quite strong. There will always be a few naff releases here and there.

Started playing Mad Max tonight and this was a pleasant surprise for PS+. I almost bought this a few times but never did for various reasons kinda glad I waited.

@Tasuki Yeah me too, it always seems to pop up in sales on psn for about a tenner. That and Arkham Knight.

I like the sound of building up your vehicle and the vehicle combat.

Q Bert is bottom of the barrel stuff. The original game is better than the remake, at least theres tension.

Im really hoping we get a sports or strategy game soon. Please Sony make it happen.

With Beyond Two Souls releasing this month on Plus, I got to thinking — I wonder how much difference it actually makes to sales of a new game when they put a prequel or related game as a free game on Plus.

My personal experience is that it both can help and hinder my tendency to buy a new release. For example, a couple years ago I thought it excellent strategy to release MGS Ground Zeroes as a free game on Plus like 2 months ahead of Phantom Pain. It helped solidify my decision to buy TPP day 1. More recently, the inclusion of Bloodborne a couple months ago has been a real treat to play for me as a newcomer to Soulsborne games and has me actually seriously considering picking up Dark Souls Remaster. Now with Beyond TS, the intent is clear to amp up for Detroit, but I think they should have tried to release it last month or the month before because being in the same month as the Detroit release may actually deter some from buying Detroit day 1. For me, as interested and excited as I am for Detroit, I think I’ll just play the free Beyond TS first and wait on buying Detroit. I can get my Quantic Dream fix for free first before dropping $60. I realize they are completely different games, but they are the same genre and I usually like to mix things up and not play too similar games back to back.

In my opinion, if you’re going to try to amp up interest in a new release, you need to get the free game out there a couple months in advance to give people time to play the free one and then be ready to buy the new one day 1.

I don’t game as much as some, so maybe I’m way off on this and the statistics may show that most people complete the free game within the first week or two, but for me it takes time to get around to it.