Taxes and Production Costs: Is Gaming Getting More Expensive?
Back in the early 80s, as an anti-piracy measure, British games developer Ultimate Play The Game doubled the price of their new title Sabre Wulf. The rationale behind this odd decision was that people would be less willing to loan out their precious cassette tape to friends to copy and sell on.
Of course, due to the high cost of Sabre Wulf, it’s very likely that the opposite happened – and this £9.95 classic stood as something of a cautionary tale for early games creators.
Horizon Forbidden West
Today, the idea of a AAA game selling for £9.95, let alone the 1984 standard of £5.95, sounds a little bit ridiculous. Gaming, for all the love we shower upon it, can seem like one of the most expensive hobbies out there, with the upcoming PlayStation 5 game Horizon Forbidden West going for £69.99 or £79.99 for the Deluxe Edition, neither of which have anything physical to play with – not even a box.
Recently, Forbes reacted with horror at the idea that gamers are spending up to £100 a month on games and content such as microtransactions but, as demonstrated, this figure may be less than two entire games. While there are plenty of less expensive options out there, especially from indie developers and on platforms that support retro games, it does sometimes feel like AAA gaming at release is becoming a bit of an exclusive club.
Mobile Gaming
It’s not an impenetrable thing, though, and there’s much to be said for bankrolling the pastime sensibly. To borrow an example from casino gaming, the website BonusFinder recently wondered how players’ finances influenced their time at the tables, asking questions like ‘how will it affect your gameplay?’ and discussing the various types of bankroll schemes and house edges. BonusFinder’s Rob has analyzed a lot of them and written about it here, with a focus on the Kelly Criterion and the Martingale system.
With its small, frequent payments, casino gaming is perhaps closer to mobile gaming in terms of how the hobby is funded. According to Statista, playing on iOS or Android requires a much lower spend per month than AAA gaming, coming in at an average of £17.92. This figure is an average of new player expenditure from four countries, namely, the US, UK, Germany, and South Korea.
Final Fantasy VII
While we’ve already complained about the price of AAA gaming, we haven’t yet pondered why prices seem to be increasing. There are a number of ideas put forward by fans online, such as pricing sticking to a worldwide average, rather than what people can afford in each specific territory, as well as publisher greed and extreme taxes on the import of game-related hardware, especially in South America.
The answer to this particular quandary is quite simple, though – games are expensive to make and, as a consequence, actually represent excellent value for money. Back in 1997, when Final Fantasy VII was released, its development costs may have been as high as US$234 million – yet it only cost around £40. Two decades on, the US$316 million of Cyberpunk 2077 still produced a relatively low launch price of £60.
While it might seem expensive on a personal level, from a production perspective, games do seem to have resisted significant price rises over the years.