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The pressure on full-RRP games is higher than it’s ever been, one developer has claimed.
People Can Fly’s Adrian Chmielarz made the claim to Games Industry, having speculated that the studio’s 2011 shooter Bulletstorm – which was loved by critics but failed to meet publisher EA’s commercial expectations – suffered as a result of the shifting market.
"Everybody is smart in retrospect and looking back I do think that we were possibly among the first victims of this giant shift in gaming, where the middle-class triple-A games began to die,” he said.
Not ‘middle-class’ by quality, but we didn’t have ten multiplayer modes and co-op and all of that. The saying in the industry right now is, ‘If you want to sell a game for $60, to the player it has to feel like $200.’
"Bulletstorm was a $60 game for $60. And these days $60 for a game sounds basically crazy, when there are literally hundreds of high quality games out there for a much smaller price – even on console. In 2014, $60 for a game is a little insane."
Chmielarz went on to say that the increasing demand for huge levels of game content is actually at odds with the reality of how games are consumed.
"There is a necessity to add filler in triple-A games, whether it be collectibles or one more wave of enemies," he added. "It’s unfortunate, and it’s also proof that the world is insane. Because you have players demanding that games are long, but then you look at the data and see that not even half of those people see even half of the game.
There’s clearly something wrong there, right? 70 or 80 per cent of people never finish the game. That’s insanity, right?”
