Happy to, Warren. So the common misconception is that video games have ever been a children's 'toy'. Dating back to the late 70s and early 80s, video games have always been a predominately adult activity. It may not seem that way the average gamer today, as when we were born the NES had just come out and the market was just recovering from the Video Game Crash.
What has changed is the astronomical increase to video game development. This fancy graph from 2013 does an excellent job of showing the exponential growth of game design cost:
![[Image: Factor_5_dev_costs.jpg]](http://monstervine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Factor_5_dev_costs.jpg)
Edit: Image at most post.Â
Ok, so the other part of this is the publisher's taking a cut ontop of development costs. Afterall, publishers are the ones taking the risk of marketing and manufacturing the game. In the last five years, a new clause has come up in that relationship, that if a game doesn't hit a metacritic value then the developer earns even less money from the publisher.
Metacritic is a very important part of today's developer culture because of the importance common gamers place in critic scores. A low quality game drops sales and lowers the pay out per game sold for the developer.
What has changed is the astronomical increase to video game development. This fancy graph from 2013 does an excellent job of showing the exponential growth of game design cost:
Edit: Image at most post.Â
Ok, so the other part of this is the publisher's taking a cut ontop of development costs. Afterall, publishers are the ones taking the risk of marketing and manufacturing the game. In the last five years, a new clause has come up in that relationship, that if a game doesn't hit a metacritic value then the developer earns even less money from the publisher.
Metacritic is a very important part of today's developer culture because of the importance common gamers place in critic scores. A low quality game drops sales and lowers the pay out per game sold for the developer.
