Telltale boss blasts pricing of games

PALGN News | Lauds episodic content.

Telltale executive Kevin Bruner has criticised the cost of videogames, and accused the industry of producing only one type of game for consumers.

"I think the industry is creating one type of content, which is the thousand-page novel," Bruner told GamesIndustry.biz at the Nordic Game conference. "If you went into a bookstore and every book was a thousand-page novel - not everybody wants that. We've gone through five or six years of just one type of game offering - the 50-hour first-person shooter type thing. I think with the Wii and handhelds and the casual games space, we're seeing a lot of consumers who want something different."

Bruner also railed against the price of modern games, saying that Telltale believes "that games are too expensive right now. A lot of not only episodic games but games in general are not priced appropriately."

And on the subject of episodic game content, Bruner was again vocal, pointing out that, "I've made a lot of traditional games, and I much prefer to [develop episodic content] than spend two years making a game that comes out and if you screw something up, there's no opportunity to fix it - you just move on and do something else. We really like the [episodic] business model, we like being able to interact with the consumer regularly. I think once you get over the production challenges of creating a game a month then it's a really attractive model to be in."

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8 Comments

ugh the boot

5 years ago

Well personally i'd rather buy one pie instead of 5 little party pies. Buying 5 little party pies is a pain in the ass when I could get the same satisfaction from a regular one.

Oh we're talking about games here...

Karai Pantsu

5 years ago

What he's saying makes a lot of sense. There is definately a growing market for casual games, and episodic content like recent the Sam'n'Max game(s) are in a great position to piggy-back that trend. Does that make the 'thousand page novel' games any less of a product? Not at all.
And I'd like to see anyone here claim to have never once complained about the cost of games

Skiller

5 years ago

He lost all credibillity when he mentioned 50 hour fps games, anyone who takes 50 hours to complete any fps I know of is clearly not a gamer. I struggle to stretch out fps games for more than 10 hours, let alone 50, and if he is including multiplayer then clearly episodic content doesn't even apply so it's unreasonable to make such a claim.

DrTim

5 years ago

Sure games cost a bundle, but aren't production costs climbing as "Next-Gen"games are being pumped out atm?

Skiller

5 years ago

DrTim wrote

Sure games cost a bundle, but aren't production costs climbing as "Next-Gen"games are being pumped out atm?

Not as much as publishers want you to believe, but the cost is a big issue with an episodic game as 70-95% of game development time is used to develop the engine/foundation for it meaning that you'll still need a year or two leading up to the first episode to get that done. And when you release you wont make much (if anything) from imediate sales as the price of the episodes will need to be low enough to attract sales, and then if the game isn't absolutally amazing alot of people wont get the next episodes.

It's possible that $15m goes into the game, then you sell 250,000 copies of the first ep at $20 and get back 1/3 of your costs but lose ~75% of your customers and only sell 60,000 of each following episode of which you would need 9 more before you start making a profeit.
Compare that to just making the full game and selling 175,000 copies at $100 and making $2.5m. Also since 5 eps is costing customers $100 and 5 eps probably covers the length of a $100 game you could split up the 10 ep series into a full game + sequalso you make $2.5m on the original and assuming the same number of ppl also like it (~25%) you'd sell 43,000 at $100 to make an additional $4.3m.
So making a game a 10 ep series would net $800,000, making it a single full game would net $2.5m, making it a full game and sequal would net $6.8m, and even if the sequal was just an expansion (which would probably be more likely) an sold at half price it would net $4.65m.

I think that should show what publishers have to factor in when deciding how to release a game, releasing a full game and dodgey sequal is far more attractive as less risk and more profeit is involved.

GooberMan

5 years ago

DrTim wrote

aren't production costs climbing as "Next-Gen"games are being pumped out atm?

Isn't the user base of games machine owners increasing daily? Spiderman 3 had a budget of $258 million US, but I still only paid $15AU for a ticket.

Jaws

5 years ago

Gaming is now bigger than ever. Especially considering a demographic that encompasses every age group now as opposed to younger people, say 15 years ago. Because it has grown in size, many people are simply in it for the pure cash in. That's why gaming has now adopted a trend model similar to the latest wearable fashion. When there is a greater focus to actually generate profits, less forsight is shed on passionately developing a game. EA is prime example of that.

As far as pricing goes; what our friend at Telltale said applies TRIPLE to Australian shores. There was a fantastic analysis of the unjustified over-inflation we face here for games online somewhere, but I lost the link.

5 years ago

DrTim wrote

Sure games cost a bundle, but aren't production costs climbing as "Next-Gen"games are being pumped out atm?

"Production costs climbing" is just a standard speal given by publishers to justify increasing the cover price. I say cover price as ad-nauseous advertising in games is apparently acceptable now days - due in part to “climbing production costs”, whilst at the same time the packaging of games is slimming down also due to increased production costs...

Most games are excessively over priced. I only buy second hand games in order to save money and this is something publishers also want to stop, due to the climbing cost of production and high price of beach front executive condominiums.

PC games fair much better as the price drops reasonably quick and you can usually ring-out more game time with free mods.

This is an area that has more recently drawn the attention of publishers who wish to replace silly free mods with valuable chargeable downloads of content (****). Better still; they would like to charge you repeatably with episodic releases of the same **** slightly repackaged and retold in a slightly different way (Im thinking Dot Hack). Complaints about quality, originality, story plot or game play time are not relevant due naturally to the burdens of climbing production costs.

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