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Martin Klima, co-founder of Warhorse Studios—the developer behind the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series—revealed in an interview with PC Gamer that his studio has run out of options for dealing with soaring development costs, and said he wants Grand Theft Auto VI to take the lead in raising game prices. On 5ch’s Hardware/Industry board, discussion ranged from the backlash Nintendo faced for selling Mario Kart World at $80, to the structural issue of hardware and GPU performance races driving up development costs, to whether 4K graphics are even necessary.
“We want GTA 6 to lead the charge on raising game prices”—”We’ve run out of options” amid soaring development costs… says Kingdom Come developer’s co-founder
Martin Klima, co-founder of Warhorse Studios, developer of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series, has drawn attention after telling PC Gamer in an interview that he wants Grand Theft Auto VI (hereafter GTA 6) to take the lead in raising game prices.
“I hope GTA paves the way.”
Source: gamespark.jp / Original article here
What people said
Because if the quality isn't high, nerds like you won't shut up about it.
Once resolution stops being the bottleneck, the next money pit will be grass, trees, and arm hair detail.
That's something you should've said to the GPU makers lol. And the GPU makers themselves hit a wall hyping resolution, so now they've moved on to AI as their next hustle lol.
They always say that better hardware performance will make development cheaper, though…
Funny thing is, these are the same people who defended Nintendo when they raised prices.
In Japan people just quietly stop buying instead. In fact, "sale beggars" and "video beggars" (people who just watch playthroughs instead of buying) are on the rise, and students have basically switched to just playing mobile games.
Food costs in America are insanely high, so there's no money left over for entertainment.
If you're making that level of game on PS5 hardware, you wouldn't even need optimization costs, so it'd be cheaper than back in the PS4 era. But honestly, if that level of game is fine, indie devs can make it nowadays and sell it for under $10 anyway—so it wouldn't be profitable for a studio with a full staff to make it.
Even at FHD, this generation's graphics are way better anyway.
Because it's not America.
The indie games you and I usually see online or in videos are just a tiny fraction of standout hits. Over 90% of indie games are either super-degraded ripoffs of whatever's popular, or on the level of obscure crap games from the '90s.
You're talking like standout hits among major-studio games aren't also a tiny fraction. Well, whatever, Re: #53's point wasn't really about sheer numbers anyway.
If the list price goes up, then even a 30% or 50% off sale ends up costing more than before. 50% off an ¥8,000 game is ¥4,000, but 50% off a ¥10,000 game is ¥5,000. So the whole market price range shifts upward, sales included.
Wolverine's quality level deserves the criticism though—you shouldn't be shipping something like that lol.
Do you not get that the premise behind all the criticism of Wolverine is the fact that it cost $300 million? "You spent a huge budget and it still looks shoddy" and "you want to spend a huge budget but the profitability is shaky" are two completely different arguments.
Even if Kairosoft or Kemco games are genuinely enjoyable, the question is whether you'd actually choose them over other games. Only a small core of diehard fans would do that. Isn't that exactly why Kairosoft started using licensed characters like Fujiko Fujio's or Kochikame's? In reality, anyone outside the core fanbase had already gotten tired of them.
Sounds like something you'd say after watching a low-res gameplay video on a tiny phone screen without actually playing it. Cherry-picking only linear games as examples because you want to bash 4K games—are you trolling?
It was the users who started demanding better graphics in the first place. And conversely, it's also the users who demand pixel art while just assuming pixel art is "easy" and only pushing for cheapness.
Even at "Switch 2 level," if it's a later multiplatform release of a big-budget PS4/PS5 title, the development cost is already pretty high. DLC and season passes started back in the PS3/Xbox 360 era precisely because, even then, the budgets already called for a list price over ¥10,000. And users came to expect that level of quality as a given, too.
If they dropped 4K, development costs probably wouldn't climb nearly as much.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The soaring cost of game development has become a shared challenge across the industry in recent years, with production costs for big-budget titles continuing to balloon alongside advances in graphics and open-world design. When Nintendo released Switch 2 titles like Mario Kart World at $80, backlash against the price hike was strong in North America, while in Japan the tendency noted was quieter—people simply refraining from buying rather than protesting openly. In the thread, discussion shifted from whether the price hike itself was justified to the “root cause of rising development costs,” with some blaming the performance race among hardware and GPU makers, and others pointing out that DLC and season passes originated back in the PS3/Xbox 360 generation—making for a structural debate that couldn’t be reduced to simple right-or-wrong.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Kingdom Come developer: “Development costs have risen too much, we’ve hit our limit—we want GTA 6 to lead the charge and raise game prices”.”
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