care to elaborate? I am speaking relatively here. Just the production costs. Not the projects.
A game like Call of Duty for example has to make a lot more money to get all the costs in, so a game like Skyrim has to sell around 3 million copies just to get even (according to Bethesda).
Games like CoD easily spend around 100m of Dollar on marketing alone.
Now a game like Path of Exile require MUCH less in making them compared to a game like Diablo 3. Crowd Funding projects are another proof. Those games dont lack necessarily quality or content. They just dont go with the LATEST possible technology nor do they spend to much time on marketing. And why should they? Wasteland 2 would not be the better game just becaues it features dynamic shadows and HDR lighting. But even that CAN be used for games today without exploding in price.
As said, its a lot easier today to get all the things you need together. There are websites for concept artists, 3d models, programming, a lot of open source software and programmers out there or platforms where you can hire them. There is today Blender, Google Sketchup and many other free ware programms that people can use to experiment and learn. Programs like Photoshop, 3Dmax/maya or Z-Brush are affordable for the usual person 600$ compared to like some 5000-10.000$(!) somewhere in the past, and that all for professional programms! They do whole movies with Blender today and there is an huge community behind it helping each other, with tutorials etc. The things alone I do with photoshop and ilustrator are self taught. Not long ago if you wanted to learn those things you had to pay a lot for workshop where someone would explain you how to operate the programms.
I dont get this "it was all easier in the past!" thing from people that actually dont work with designs.
The risk you have to take today is the same like in the past that is of course true. And I dont dispute that. But to just find the people and tools is today easier compared to the past before the Internet became that huge social platform. And in some cases its even cheaper. Seriously, certain modifications alone today offer more then some games of the 90s. Be it single player OR multiplayer. Thats because its easier to get the people together to share your vision or to work on an single project. The work can be done from home over the net and send over in less then a day. I can do concept here from Germany for a company in the US. All over the net while maybe not long ago it would have been required to meet at least once because you cant really do everything over the phone.
Thats of course not always good for the usual person trying to get a job. Because everyone can download the programms and do something right away. Its not that hard to get illustrator or photoshop to work on your PC watch some tutorials and with enough time you might learn how to use the programms. And honestly thats what many graphic designers do today. Operating the software not coming up with new and crative ideas, that is done in some huge and popular agency where they have the money and time to come up with new fancy designs. But as far as the "usual" buisness goes a lot has matured. And the same is true for games. Standardisation is the keyword.
