Let me start by saying this much: I get it. I play games too. I have a thousand on steam and hundreds more across other platforms. I burn hours in old video games and I am really loving stingy with my cash given I don't make as much as I want right now. I understand that it is frustrating, after 50+ years of Games-as-Products (a one time purchase for a tangible item you take full ownership of) for the industry to suddenly head into the Games-as-Services model. I understand that from the outside, it doesn't make sense why games don't get cheaper as far as the initial purchase, but then suddenly demand more in order to access content, some of which might even be vital to the experience.
I get it.
But I also understand the other side, because I work in a company where we face life or death decisions regarding business every single day.
You might believe that the relationship between technology and content is 1:1. That is, the ability for new technologies to produce the same amount of content at a higher quality has stayed the same. This is not true. Technology
is getting better, but the expectations are always bigger and we have to fill demand at a rate never before anticipated. The jump from SD (480p) to HD (1080p) was already a massive jump in and of itself that quite a few studios are still feeling the heat (why do you think splitscreen has all but disappeared in recent years?), but now we're even expected to pump out 4K content which requires even MORE work. It's additional work to build the highest quality assets, but then more work to also test and ensure compatibility. You can't just smudge up a small blurry 600x400 texture for a grate any more; you're expected to pump it up to a much higher resolution with far more minor details.
In the 90s, a single team for a game could be filled by at absolute maximum, 50 people. Nowadays, it's 300 or more for your bog standard AAA, and we're expected to provide them better salaries and all of the Government-mandated employee benefits that were never provided in the early days. The fact of the matter is that every studio needs more and more specialists to cover very specific pieces of work given that there's so much work, whereas in times past, everybody was a generalist and was expected to be good at everything. You can see a good example of this in
Liz England's blog entry on the The Door Problem, which details just a small fraction of the amount of people involved over such a simple decision. Don't forget, too, that you need to purchase furniture, the equipment, the software licenses and cover expenses for every employee, and in many cases you also need to pay for their training, since they won't be producing content and will actually take up your other developer's time to get up to speed on your workflow.
Did I also mention that inflation has risen (as is normal for the economy), but we're expected to continue to sell for lower and lower with higher content/quality expectations?
For a second, also consider the old industry. This was an industry where developers didn't earn the rights to credits until they quit and formed third party companies, but the costs of the physical media meant they had to produce games quickly and cheaply. That mentally continued forward, with so many studios falling trap to the production of budget crap. Even today that mentality still exists in many studios; quite a lot of studios need to produce more than one game a year to subsidise cost of development and make a profit towards the next game. They're now in a Catch-22 position where breaking out of the vicious cycle to focus on a longer development process for better quality work would simply cost more than they can afford to keep paying all of their employees a fair salary.
Yes, on some level, there is of course a bottom line and shareholders who demand they take home personal profit. But the far bulk of game purchases are simply going to ensure the survival of the companies as a whole, as well as those who staff them. You can't keep making games unless you make back your expenses and then some money to fund the next project.
I would love for more Product Games, but services that encourage continually investment from the player are the most cost effective means of survival right now. Retention has become the name of the game, because the risk of producing new games continually increases greater and greater.
Also, keep in mind that the people who design the financial systems aren't usually in the publishing studio. The publisher will have a spec and will okay or negate things as they see fit, but the actual design and implementation is down to the developer. DICE came up with the lootboxes of Battlefront II, modifying a system that gamers have let fester for over a decade. This isn't some recent development. This was the natural progression of things.
