AAA Videogames Are Too Expensive

This has been coming for a long time, honestly, especially when Sony announced the first £69.99 launch titles for the PlayStation 5, making them $30 more expensive than the same game in America. It started before that, of course, with multiple editions of games, season passes, battle passes and microtransactions… But this sort of thing requires research, so the article had taken a back-burner.

But then Ubisoft had a sale. “Upgrade your favourite titles with new content” Ubisoft proudly proclaimed! While selling the Watch Dogs: Legion Ultimate Edition for £99.99, keeping those three characters, three outfits and six masks behind a £16 paywall over the Gold Edition. Of course, even the Ultimate Edition doesn’t give you the items stuck behind the in-game microtransactions, and on PC it doesn’t give you four weeks of “VIP status” or Watch_Dogs Complete Edition so that’s even worse value for money. When £100 isn’t enough money to get you every piece of content in a game, then it’s too expensive. Surely even people who are fine with £70 games can see that!

I’m not against people making money. I once had a lengthy conversation with the local comic shop proprietor, as I was curious how he converted dollar cover prices to pounds for sale. He made surprisingly little on each issue. But let’s talk videogames!

Let’s start with some facts. Most AAA videogames on PC will cost between £30 and £55 based on recent “standard edition” releases. In 1989 you could expect to pay between £18 and £89 (in today’s money) for a copy of Operation Wolf, depending on the platform, based on multiple magazine adverts which you can find on Archive.org. For more context, Super Mario Bros. 2 went on sale for £101 in today’s money, and fewer people buying videogames in general, with the PlayStation 2 selling 91 million more units than the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The first issue of the magazine GamePro, published in May 1989, reported that Taito Software were projected to have made $500 million in 1988, mainly from arcade cabinets. At time of writing in today’s money that’s over £932 million. In 1988, Taito released at least 15 home console/computer titles in North America, and Operation Wolf was one of the highest-grossing arcade games in the region.

Compare that to one game released in 2019: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which made $600 million in three days. I chose Modern Warfare because, according to the 2020 annual investor report, money made by Modern Warfare in 2020 was higher than the money made by Cold War, so Activision didn’t put out a press release about Cold War’s sales.

Anyway, as you can see, £439 million in today’s money is quite a bit lower than the previously stated £932 million. One game worldwide on three platforms in three days, compared to 15 games in one territory on multiple platforms in 365 days. To get up to Taito’s company-wide total, Activision Blizzard would have had to sell that one game for over two months, because year-end sales after its November release put Modern Warfare at over £733 million.

Assuming that every copy of Modern Warfare sold was on console (the most expensive version), they sold over 12 million copies in two months, and managed to make just shy of what Taito Software did from their entire library in a year. That was admittedly a good year for them, because as I mentioned Cold War would go on to make less money the following year.

Of course, it would be silly to think that games don’t cost more to produce now than they did in 1989. Taking into account the individual workers, there’s more than just coders, such as level designers, sound engineers, voice actors, writers, motion capture… Even ignoring the far larger number of people who work on games these days, there’s licensing of engines and music to consider. But you spend money to make money. Nobody who designs a character in a AAA game is getting your money - they were paid from funds that the publisher already gave the developer. Some movie actors get a bonus depending on cinema box office takings, but that’s not a thing in videogames. The closest is when a publisher will reward a team for getting high review scores - but how far down do those bonuses actually go? That depends on each person’s contract. Buying a game just to support a developer doesn’t guarantee that it will do that, if the publisher decides that people aren’t getting bonuses - the publisher already paid them for the work.

Assuming you’ve bought the game to support the developer, what about the season pass? A different team entirely might have worked on that, and the content varies as do prices. Same thing with cosmetics, boosts and characters exclusive to the in-game store - do you buy those to support the developer? Are you happy missing out on content by not buying them?

So, let’s take another look at our facts and see if games are too expensive, or if it’s fine that they’re going up to £70 and beyond. I’ve gone on a few slight tangents, I’m aware. For clarity’s sake, I looked at the Office for National Statistics to see how much money people had to spend. Mean disposable income in 2020 was £36,900. Mean disposable income in 1989 was around £58,000 in today’s money.

In 1989, if you only bought the most expensive versions of games, you could buy 650 of them with your disposable income. In 2020 you could buy 683 of the most expensive standard editions. That’s more, right? But in 1989 you were buying a complete game. As I said, that was 683 standard editions without season passes and microtransactions - so you don’t have all of the content available.

The mean average price for season passes (based on 20 random AAA PC season passes) is £31.24. That doesn’t include the fact that some AAA titles have multiple season passes. It also doesn’t include any of the four Dead or Alive 6 season passes, the cheapest of which is £65.99. Even assuming that not every single one of your shiny new 683 AAA titles has a season pass, you’re not going to be able to afford all of them.

As I mentioned at the start, you can get the Ultimate Edition of some games, which at least comes with most of the content. That leaves you with only 400 complete AAA titles, thanks to your disposable income.

This is why people say that games are too expensive. You have the figures and where they were sourced from if you want to argue with me, but I don’t know why you would want to. Activision Blizzard made $1 billion in two months, and the CEO of Activision Blizzard gets $875,000 a year before his bonus. Square Enix had net sales in the 2021 financial year of £2,223,071,871.98 - yes that’s two billion. They only released two remakes and a rhythm game.

I haven’t even touched on Nintendo’s greed, because most AAA games will have heavy discounts months or years later. Even Call of Duty can go as low as £7, and yet the cheapest that Nintendo’s first-party titles get is in the low-£30s. The upcoming Metroid Dread is going to be a classic 2D Metroid game, and is going to cost £49.99. Some people don’t like that because it’s “just” a side scrolling platformer. I don’t like it because there are a hundred 2D metroidvanias made by indie and AA developers which never cost more than £34.99. And the AA publishers behind those didn’t make £12 million in software sales in the three months, unlike Nintendo according to its first quarter financial report.

If you’re gaming on PlayStation, Xbox or PC, you do have options to pay less. Ubisoft+, Game Pass, PlayStation Now, EA Play… The number of games and amount of content available varies, though, and you have to keep your subscription going for as long as you want to keep playing. For one month of all of the subscription services, guaranteeing you the latest AAA titles, it would cost £57.95. Worth noting that none of them include PS5 or Switch games, and some Ubisoft+ titles are included with Stadia Pro. Game Pass does also include EA Play titles, but you need to subscribe to EA Play Pro for the most recent EA games.

So, even though the price of a subscription to all of the services for one month can cost you more than one AAA title, it’s good value for money. So long as you get enough time to play multiple games each week, anyway. If you only get time to play one game, though? And as I mentioned, most of those services change the available games constantly to give people plenty of options - but if you haven’t had your fill before it leaves, you’re stuck.

The main takeaway I’d like people to have after having read all of this, is that AAA games are expensive. They are objectively expensive, and no amount of looking back at how much Sonic CD cost is going to change that. Publishers make millions of pounds every year and always have done, because videogames are expensive and always have been. The price barrier for entry into this hobby is lower than ever with subscription services and amazing indie games, but unless you wait for a deep sale on AAA titles, it’s an expensive hobby to keep practicing. It sucks, but so long as people buy the latest games as soon as they’re released, publishers have no trouble charging you higher amounts.

And don’t get me started on how you merely license digital games…