Where are all the cheap games?

And why publishers should take more risks

So, I recently completed Insomniac Games’ 2016 reboot (remake?) Ratchet and Clank for PS4 and oh my goodness, what a great time. Although it was made as a tie-in to the horrific 2016 film of the same name, the game could not be more different in terms of its quality. The people over at Insomniac’s North Carolina studio sure do understand what makes Ratchet great. The enemies, the weapons, the light platforming elements, they’re all here and they all combine to make an incredibly enjoyable experience.

Although I only recently sat down and played through this gem of a game, I actually purchased Ratchet and Clank when it came out in 2016 for a cool $39. Now, if you’re familiar with purchasing games at full price, you’ll know that 39 dollars is not usually what one pays for a new release. From around 2005 to 2020, a new retail release would normally go for about $59. And last year, with the advent of the new PS5 and Xbox Series X/S and the years of damage the Federal Reserve has done to the US Dollar, that price jumped up to $69.

History of game prices

While many will tell you that games are actually cheaper than they’ve ever been, citing prices for games in the 90s (which could be as high as 80-120 dollars) as an example, what is often misunderstood is that those prices were tied to the expensive cartridge technology that was prevalent until the advent of the original PlayStation. When the PlayStation introduced the CD to the mainstream (yes, there were earlier examples such as the Sega CD and Philips CD-I), game prices evened out to around $49. CD technology meant that games could be pressed onto discs cheaply with basically infinite storage capacity. For example, 2000’s Final Fantasy IX launched on four discs, but even so, it retailed for the same 49 dollars that every other big PS1 game did. So, from PlayStation’s 1995 western launch on, the medium of delivery ceased to be the dictating factor in game prices; instead, game production costs and maximizing profit had a greater impact on a game’s price.

Profit incentive in an increasingly costly development environment

It’s on this second aspect to a game’s price that I want to drill down on: maximizing profit. With every proximate generation of consoles, increases in computing power afford the ability to render more and more realistic game worlds, but this comes at a price. The more you increase realism, the more time and money you have to spend on producing higher quality assets, animation, and rendering technology. This isn’t to say that more stylized, less realistic games don’t have their own production hurdles, but surely it has to be the case that it takes more time and money to build something with the visual fidelity of Red Dead Redemption II than it does to build Ratchet and Clank. The games industry doesn’t really publish their budgets like the film industry tends to, but some rough maths from GamesBeat place the development costs for Red Dead II at around $170 million, and the marketing costs associated with that development only further balloon that price. That’s a lot of money! But Read Dead Redemption II, as a product of Rockstar Games, was always going to make a lot of money. Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar’s previous effort, has sold literally 140 million copies, many of those at full price, making it probably the most profitable piece of media of all time. And while not as smashing of a success, Red Dead Redemption II has sold 36 million copies which, aside from outliers like GTA V, Minecraft, and the like, still makes it one of the best-selling games of all time. So, Rockstar is able to make such expensive games because their games invariably push a lot of units. Rockstar produce highly polished, mass-market open-world experiences, and their sales reflect just how mass-market they are.

So, I feel as though the increasing costs associated with game development have narrowed the scope of what most major publishers are willing to fund. As was reported in Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago, Sony, for instance, seems to have narrowed its shift to only funding the most blockbuster, mass-market games they can. And it just so happens that these types of games are often the most expensive to make. God of War, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us Part II: all of these games have several things in common. They’re all third-person, story-driven experiences with the highest degree of production quality. Two of them are third-person shooters. Sure, they’re different in how they play, but in the large scheme of what games have to offer, they’re pretty similar.

Anyways, because these types of games are what sell the most, and because development is becoming increasingly costly, many publishers don’t want to take risks on unknown quantities. Again, this can be seen in the closure of Sony’s Japan Studio. What once was a creative in-house incubation studio for games like Ape Escape, Puppeteer, and Gravity Rush is now a husk whose directive seems to be pushing out Astro Bot games. By the way, the Astro Bot games are marvelous, but when Sony decides to center an entire studio around a single IP/character, it doesn’t give me faith that they value innovation.

Ratchet as a case study in how to produce a lower budget game

So, I’ve been giving Sony a lot of shit so far in this piece, but I want to circle back to Ratchet and Clank, a Sony-published sub retail release. Why did Ratchet cost 39 dollars? It’s simple! It probably cost less to make than a Last of Us or Red Dead style release. Again, games companies don’t generally publish budgets, and the same goes for Ratchet, but it doesn’t take a detective to deduce that other games might take more money to produce. Playing through the game, you can see that some corners were cut to keep within the lower budget. Some textures and models aren’t as high fidelity as Insomniac’s more high production releases (like Spider-Man). Also, the animation within the in-game cutscenes leaves a bit to be desired. But, on the whole, Ratchet and Clank is an example of making the right cuts in order to keep a game’s budget in check. The core gameplay is fun, the visuals are generally spectacular, and it’s an overall pleasant experience. Also, and this isn’t really a cut, Ratchet’s more cartoony style probably lowers production costs, as artists don’t have to go through the painstaking process of producing incredibly realistic assets. Instead, they can use this style to their advantage, producing still high fidelity, yet less costly cartoon-like assets. Additionally, I would think that a lot of the R&D on the tech side was already done with Insomniac’s previous release, Sunset Overdrive. Sunset was their first big release on the PS4/Xbox One generation of systems, and they were probably able to carry over a lot of the engine from that release over to the Ratchet project, lowering costs on this front as well.

All these factors probably played into keeping Ratchet’s budget lower than the typical Sony release, but what about the actual retail price? Just because a game is cheaper to make doesn’t mean that its price must necessarily be lower than other games, right? If Sony felt that they could charge a full $59 for Ratchet and Clank and make more money, they probably would have, but they released it at $39 instead. I’m no bean counter, but I have to think that there were many cost analyses going on behind the scenes that lead Sony to believe that they would sell more copies of the game at $39 than $59, enough to outrun the difference in profit from selling fewer copies at $59. And the game seems to have proved its worth! While hard sales figures are rarely released in the gaming industry, the NPD Group, a market research firm that releases monthly game sales rankings, showed Ratchet and Clank as the second best-selling game of its release month, trailing only Dark Souls III. NPD’s Liam Callahan said this of Ratchet, “Ratchet & Clank had the best launch of any game in the Ratchet & Clank franchise when adjusting for the number of days sold in the data month.”

Bearing these high sales figures in mind, the camp at Sony seems to think there’s enough interest in Ratchet and Clank to justify a price jump. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is coming out in a couple of months and will retail for a full $69. Honestly, I don’t have a problem with this. In fact, I think it proves that publishers should funder lower-budget, lower-priced games. Because Sony took a risk on the Ratchet remake, they saw the interest, reaped the rewards, and funded a full-priced sequel. But if companies don’t take these sorts of risks, the medium will become filled with same-y, serious third-person action games that the market will eventually grow tired of, and companies like Sony will have no other products to fall back on, save for Ratchet and Astro Bot.

So my prescription is this: fund lower-budget games. Do more Ratchet style releases. Take risks. Release them to the public at a price point that makes consumers more willing to make a blind purchase. Then, if the data says so, fund a sequel and capitalize on the popularity of the previous entry. If you think about it, big publishers are directly incentivized to fund smaller games. If they fail, it’s not that big of a deal. God of War and The Last of Us will subsidize the blow. But if they do succeed, the upside profit potential is so huge that those that funded it will seem like geniuses for taking the risk. Think of Rocket League, Minecraft, and the like. These games were relatively cheap to make, but have since sold many millions and millions of copies to the point that the return on initial investment must be massive.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on game funding. Thanks for reading the ramble!