A Frank Plan to Reduce the Cost of All Video Games

A modest proposal to remove from games a common but unneeded distraction

Have you seen video game prices these days? They’re getting out of hand. They want $70 for a game now. It’s because these triple AAA games cost so much to make now. They have their intricate graphics, complicated physics, and giant, expansive worlds full of very repetitive objectives. The budget for these games can often be in the hundreds of millions, which is why they have a high price tag to recoup the cost.

But I have a great idea to reduce the cost of video games substantially with only a tiny reduction in their quality:

Get rid of the story.

It’s time to face the facts: No one cares about the story. Because it’s a video game, and that’s not what video games are about.

Let’s say you have a video game that’s really fun to play with a terrible story. People will play the game anyway because it’s fun and just skip through the stupid dialog. That’s basically every single Resident Evil game, and they’re extremely popular.

But let’s say you have a game that’s terrible to play but has a great story — are people going to play it? I mean, if the story is that great, maybe they’ll slog through the gameplay to see the end of a story, but that person would probably have enjoyed it more if you just gave them a TV show to watch. Can you imagine how Breaking Bad would have been if you had to do a poorly controlled escort quest of Jesse Pinkman to find out what happened next?