Potential Sub Price Decrease

[Orinori]

I have never heard of any subscription model lowering the sub price, only ever going F2P.

More likely they would increase the sub and blame "inflation" just like they have increased the base MSRP on games from $50 in the PS2 generation to $60 in the PS3 generation, to now $70. Global spending power is down, but corporations cannot abide by profits decreasing, so they will just suck whoever can afford it for more.

Also, never forget that savings are never passed on to the customer. Even though digital platforms like Steam eliminate the costs of disc manufacturing, packaging, shipping and stocking, new games are still released there for the exact same price as the physical copy.

So just because THEY are spending less on this game, doesn't mean they will let YOU spend less on it.

Yeah thats true, I guess its just wishful thinking. Though I actually do agree with box price games going up, I've been an advocate of that for years as I believe it to be one of the driving forces that make the game industry uncharacteristically greedy is the fact that the budgets for these games have skyrocketed unfathomably and yet they've remained $60 since the late 90s, but I'm getting off topic.

[LioJen]

Yeah thats true, I guess its just wishful thinking. Though I actually do agree with box price games going up, I've been an advocate of that for years as I believe it to be one of the driving forces that make the game industry uncharacteristically greedy is the fact that the budgets for these games have skyrocketed unfathomably and yet they've remained $60 since the late 90s, but I'm getting off topic.

No, they were $50 until about 2006. And that was when almost every developer made their own custom engines for every game. Today they all use a standard licensed premade engine like Unreal, which means they don't have to train anyone in its use since every programmer and graphic artist already knows it. The industry being much larger as a whole means the pool of potential employees is much larger, meaning the cost of labor has been decreased with the increase in worker competition. Many games now use a whole host of pre-made stock assets, as seen even in FFXV where they used Chinese-bought enemy assets, saving on man-hours. Average computing power is also much higher than before, which nullifies any increase in cost you may assume due to "HD graphics" being resource intensive.

Logically the cost of development should be down, and likely is. The bloated budgets probably come from inflated executive pay and marketing agencies. Keep in mind that any increase in sticker price will NOT result in a pay raise for the actual programmers, artists, and real workers on these games. It will only result in a bigger check for the guy in the suit who did nothing but sign his name, and larger dividends for the stockholders who would gladly tear the company into pieces for the same result.

[Metalface_Villain]

No, they were $50 until about 2006. And that was when almost every developer made their own custom engines for every game. Today they all use a standard licensed premade engine like Unreal, which means they don't have to train anyone in its use since every programmer and graphic artist already knows it. The industry being much larger as a whole means the pool of potential employees is much larger, meaning the cost of labor has been decreased with the increase in worker competition. Many games now use a whole host of pre-made stock assets, as seen even in FFXV where they used Chinese-bought enemy assets, saving on man-hours. Average computing power is also much higher than before, which nullifies any increase in cost you may assume due to "HD graphics" being resource intensive.

Logically the cost of development should be down, and likely is. The bloated budgets probably come from inflated executive pay and marketing agencies. Keep in mind that any increase in sticker price will NOT result in a pay raise for the actual programmers, artists, and real workers on these games. It will only result in a bigger check for the guy in the suit who did nothing but sign his name, and larger dividends for the stockholders who would gladly tear the company into pieces for the same result.

nice to see a normal and informed take in a ff14 discussion which usually tend to be filled with fanatics shilling. big ups to our anti-capitalist king of these here comments