Gaming, Pricing, and CEO Hegemony
You can pre-order Civ7 with the first few DLCs for £120.
CEO-brain is a pretty well-established problem in the games industry. It's pretty simple really - games make a lot of money from their core audience as high-cost high-enthusiasm items, but as the people in charge of the major companies become more and more "business people" the instinct is to get those numbers up.
To elaborate a bit more on what makes games interesting as a product:
- High Price - £50+ for a single product of any kind is high. You wouldn't pay that to watch a movie or listen to an album, though you might to see a play, a concert, or own a collectors edition - these are not "standard" prices though, they're upsells to fans.
- Long Term Usage - like music, fans of a game might play it for weeks or even months without any pushing from external reward systems. Unlike music, where concerts are viewed as the actual revenue stream for artists, games don't natively have any way for that long-term usage to translate into increased revenue - the software was paid for up-front, and is the extent of the product.
- Social Pressure - game purchases can be strongly motivated by pressure from friends or public figures. This cuts both ways - an unexpected promotional YouTube video can give life to a struggling project, or an arbitrary social-media campaign can stunt its potential.
- Age Diversity - the people most directly enthusiastic about games are young and lack the funds to spend high purchasing prices on them, while those that have the purchasing power tend to be more skeptical of new or unorthodox products. That the latter group are often just the same people as the former, plus time, makes this dynamic a bit more complicated.
What this means for the CEO-brained is that they have a bunch of levers they can pull to make games both worse and more profitable.
- Crank the price up - maybe your player base is older and wealthier now, so they won't say no even if they complain. They're going to play this game for hundreds of hours, so really they should have always been paying more surely.
- Drip-feed the substance of the game over a longer period of time - If new DLC/expansions are coming out every 3 months, that's basically a quarterly opportunity to upsell your player on the other stuff they haven't bought.*
- Move cosmetic content into a Recurrent Revenue Model, with a custom in-game currency to abstract away the cost. Look, this stuff is entirely optional, that's why it's only in the game if you pay extra, and keeping it separate keeps the cost of the base game down (just don't ask why this stuff used to be included by default, perfectly profitably).
- Give Early Access to Premium Buyers - if they willing to pay that much, they're probably easy to manipulate into paying even extra-er for a few days extra playing. This one is genuinely disgraceful to me for a couple or reasons. Primarily, I just hate FOMO marketing, but it also gives such an insane amount of cover for bad practice. Bad reviews flowing in? "Early" build of the game, time to fix it. Official reviews are either absent due to embargo or based on an even "early"-er version of the game, so it circumvents their consumer protection power.
- Pre-order Exclusive "Content" - Same as above, just weenier.
- Seasonal Events - these only make sense in the context of the other post-launch upsells, but they add this weird social pressure to not be missing out on some arbitrary giveaway.
Look I hate to be an old man about this stuff** but almost none of this is necessary. Civ7 might have these monetisation strategies to offset the increased cost of development, but nobody asked for them to increase the cost of development - it's a strategy game, it's about rules and interactions. There is no technical reason that Civ7 would be so much more a money pit than Civ 5 or 6.
2K and Firaxis made decisions that caused Civ7 to be disastrously expensive to make, and now they're passing those costs on to the consumer as if they're owed a profit for their hard work by default. Worse, they've tricked us into doing that work for them.
Footnotes
* From experience if you're release your (e.g.) 5th DLC, putting a small discount on older DLC massively improves their uptake at essentially no cost to you. It might feel like you're robbing yourself of future sales (something I'm a big critic of doing) but with no discount those sales don't tend to happen. Obviously, YMMV, but it's worth trying it both ways.
** This is a lie.