Wind blows, birds fly, and Tim Cain YouTubes. The Interplay, Troika, and Obsidian developer (and OG Fallout co-creator) is once again nattering on his YouTube channel (via GamesRadar), and his topic this time is the divide between physical and digital media.
Cain strikes a pretty pro-digital-distribution tone at the video's start. Being able to stick a game on Steam rather than order print runs of discs means devs have more time to work on games (because there's less lead time between finishing development and shipping), it means games are easier to patch, and it means old games—like the many classics Cain worked on—can remain easily accessible in, hopefully, perpetuity.
But where things really heat up is with Cain's thoughts on how digital distribution has impacted game pricing. "Digital is cheaper," says Cain. "It's cheaper for everybody. It's less cost all around. "In theory," he continues, "prices should've dropped, but they didn't."
In Cain's telling of events, rather than spread the wealth out of sheer generosity of spirit, the capitalists just kind of, well, kept it. "You know those cost savings for being digital? Those should have been passed onto consumers… They didn't.
"The argument I hear is, 'Well, costs were rising in development, so they were balanced.' I don't think they were balanced." In other words, the money saved on not having to do physical media any more got pocketed by the corps.
Now, there's a flipside to that. "Digital probably is the reason games have resisted matching inflation. I've said this before: I bought games for $59 in the '90s. That would have been a really expensive game these days. And these were standard games for, like, Super Nintendo."
That is to say, the extra sauce corporate bottom lines got from the recouped money that would have been spent on physical distribution meant they could keep game prices steady without it eating too much into their margins. That's Cain's explanation, anyhow.
"Cost of goods—COG. You hear this a lot as a developer, your publisher [will say] 'Our COG is really high.' Those dropped tremendously with digital, but those savings weren't passed on."
Of course, if Cain's analysis is correct, then it seems we're already past the point where the savings from digital stood any chance of being passed onto consumers. The games industry, with its ever-bigger budgets, is increasingly a series of big bets on projects that publishers hope will pull in megabucks, and more and more games are daring to charge $70 or $80 on release day. Hell, there are even whispers GTA 6 might charge as much as $100 when it releases.
