The cost of games
&lt;rant&gt;<p>This is a prime example of the practice of lying with numbers. There are two very basic &quot;cost&quot; graphs which are notably missing from this narrative, and the addition of &quot;bytes&quot; as a major factor in deciding the value of a game to players.<p>The two missing graphs are: Cost per unit sold, and revenue per unit sold. As basic as these are to any good cost&#x2F;benefit analysis, their absence indicates that they do not agree with the narrative that the price of games needs to go up; that companies need to milk more money out of their customers.<p>As for bytes, the presence or absence of bytes has no practical impact on the value of a game to a consumer. If it did, Duke Nukem Forever would be a game worthy of game of the century, whereas Faster Than Light would be forever consigned to the scrapheap.<p>Perhaps the most telling in this narrative is EA&#x27;s own comment to investors that shutting down the sale of lootboxes in Battlefront would not result in them losing money. This indicates that retail sales alone were sufficient to offset the cost of development, licensing, and marketing.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;<p>I also don&#x27;t condone piracy, but to imply that we should feel sorry for these companies who are barely scraping by is blatantly dishonest. It is especially dishonest when you consider that the bigger publishers (the ones making the outlier games on all of those cost charts) have annual profits in the billions while (oops, rant didn&#x27;t end) they prey on those susceptible to gambling addictions.