LogFAQs > #977221822

It's not that high of a growth. Compared to the inflation rates and the general size of the industry growing, a lot of smaller studios are not that profitable in the slightest, and a lot of mid sized studios mostly died out 10 or so years ago or absorbed into one giant entity to survive.

The thing is, people are massively misunderstanding the figures. Overall growth looks large, and that's almost entirely in mobile. Mobile games don't have fixed pricing and a lot of microtransaction. In terms of value in economics, it's not that this or that doesn't matter, it's that one pricing model is simply superior to another. It means live service type games, unhampered by fixed one time buy pricing or having to go on sale after a few months, are simply the actual representation of value of games

$60 in live service games don't really get you a whole lot. If the average player is spending $300 (example) for a live service game, that's actually the true worth of a game, given it doesn't die out. That means most of the non-live service games that have similar quality of production value, staying power, and the same number of actually paying customers, are also theoretically worth $300. The cost of production of cds and carts may have gone down but the manpower and technology required have gone astronomically up. There's not a whole lot of reason most games are still $60 and going on sale a few months later to less than half the price

Nintendo is living proof that depreciation, when immediately drastic depreciation isn't an expectation, can be curbed.