EA Boss Says Games Too Expensive

EA's John Riccitiello has been shaking things up at EA lately, with everything from layoffs to the purchase of BioWare. Now he's suggesting the company take some really drastic measures: make their games less expensive. "Riccitiello says the $31 billion gaming industry will suffer if it doesn't start to reevaluate its business model. Game executives at Sony, Microsoft and Activision must answer some tough questions in the coming years, like how long they can expect consumers to pay $59 for a video game. Riccitiello predicts the model will be obsolete in the next decade. 'In the next five years, we're all going to have to deal with this. In China, they're giving games away for free,' he says. 'People who benefit from the current model will need to embrace a new revenue model, or wait for others to disrupt.' As more publishers transition to making games for online distribution, Riccitiello says he expects EA will experiment with different pricing models."

Comments

Cheap games would be nice but...

[religious freak]

If this is an excuse to release crappier games, count me out. These things are expensive to make and I'd rather own 3 or 4 good games that have been invested in than 10 games that were just pounded out by some off-shore devs.

Yes, I'm sure some troll with mod points will kill my karma by me stating the obvious.

Stop licencing sports then

[DrXym]

I expect the cost of licencing NBA, FIFA, Nascar, NFL, Tiger Woods etc. far, far, far, far outweighs the costs of actual game development. Perhaps if EA wants to make a cut costs they'll relinquish their exclusive deals. Let some other company bear the weight of forking out for some exclusive franchise plough the savings into making decent titles.

Interestingly the NBA & NHL both allow multiple game franchises and probably each is better for it.

Re:Stop licencing sports then

[p0tat03]

Because not all genres are created equal. RTS games generally have lower dev costs than FPSes, due to the fact that FPS environments are scrutinized more closely, and tend to be disposable (once you've been through an area you don't go back). RPGs have the highest dev cost of all, due to players being accustomed to massive CG-quality cinematics and huge, epic storylines full of expensive voice acting, as WELL as non-recyclable maps.

I think the majority of the complaints here is that, the market's insatiable thirst for shinier graphics is ballooning the cost of content development, driving games to the edge where only "arena" based games like Sims, strategy games, and sports games, have a dev cost low enough to be profitable. HL1 was produced for a mere fraction of the cost to produce HL2, but somehow had a longer playtime. Before one blames Valve one should look at the level of workload difference between creating a scientist model in HL1, vs. the effort to do so in HL2.

One of the focuses right now for the industry is procedural content. How much can we reliably generate by machine without significantly impacting quality? Also we need to look at our toolchain, much of our tools are still too "dumb", exponentially increasing required artist hours for every extra little thing we add. The solution to our cost problem is technological - we need smarter tools that reduce man-hour cost, and we need procedural tools that can take a number of things away from humans entirely.

Re:Three models of less expensive games

[webmaster404]

Or number 4. Create Good games where people will actually pre-order and stand in line until midnight when the game is to be released. That is why Nintendo always ends up ahead in games, magazines will poke fun at the Wii, DS, GBA and Gamecube for having a lack of games but yet most of the games that are First or second party titles end up being smash hits, think about Ocarina of Time, people were willing to pay $50 for that game, even look at the Wii and how most American stores are almost always sold out of it and sometimes even Wii points! People are willing to pay full price, just don't make mediocre games (such as Tiger Woods, Madden, etc.)