If we were to quantify the increasing complexity of the videogame business of the last 30 years, we could notice that:
 the average team size has increased by a factor of more than 2000. [1]
 the budget has increased by approximately 10,000. [2]
 the media size has increased by almost 2 million. [3]

Yet, the number of gameplay hours has remained stable, or in fact, has gently decreased since the last 10 years. In 1995, gamers expected their games to entertain them for 100 hours, and few single-player games would reach that objective today - we’re rather somewhere in between 10 and 40 hours.

See where I’m heading: the cost of producing one hour of gameplay has literally gone through the roof - I’d estimate that it has been multiplied by some 20 million in the last thirty years [4] - because of the amount of content that needs to be created to fulfill the same expectations, and because of the increased complexity of techniques that need to be used to achieve that.

A few illustrations: the polygon count of environments and of characters has tremendously increased, the complexity and the efficiency of the game engines are also on the fast track. Sound, which was a by-product of videogames a few years ago, now meets the expectations of the most demanding ears, new ground-breaking special effects are created for every self-respecting triple-A game, and story ...

Wait.

Actually, there’s little - there’s no difference between the techniques used to produce a game story 30, 20, 10 years ago or today [5]. Pen, paper, research, being tuned to pop culture, to what can gamers dream about, imagination - the cost of these things hasn’t changed.

Don’t get me wrong: good game fiction is by no means easy to produce. Just because one doesn’t need to know all the subtleties of a 3D modeling package or the arcane of low-level programming to get started doesn’t mean that anyone can come up with the next Final Fantasy in a snap. That, plus the best writers are not necessarily the best game writers. But, getting the right people and dedicating enough resources to fiction is probably the most cost-efficient way to add quality content to your game.

More story doesn’t mean a more complex story. Take a game like Final Fantasy Advance. FFA features some 400 missions that the hero can fulfill. Most of the missions are very straightforward and require the party to go to a certain place and win a fight. Some just require that the player dispatch a character from their party for a few game days. But all have a context, a story, which doesn’t interfere with the main plot. It just adds background. The main game can probably be beaten in 10 or 20 hours but completing all the missions will require 100 game hours. In other terms, if the player can be interested in completing the extra missions, they will commit themselves to the game to an amount of 80 hours, with all the benefits this induces.

In comparison, GTA: San Andreas features some 80 missions, which are all much more complex than any of the FFA mission. Almost every GTA mission contains the unexpected: the objective changes during the mission, or happens to be much more complex than forecast. All missions have one or several exclusive cutscenes, complete with dialogs recorded by professional actors. The complexity of the gameplay requires that each mission be tested in depth and fine-tuned accordingly. Conclusion: it is much more expensive to produce an extra GTA mission than to create one in FFA. If GTA missions didn’t have that required threshold of complexity, it would be possible to increase the number of things to do in San Andreas tremendously!

Good writing also mean good dialogs. GTA is famous for the excellent quality of the game script, for the amount of detail put into in-game radio stations or billboard advertisements. All of this contributes to create the "GTA mood" and to make the game experience unique. By comparison, in my French version of Mercenaries - which has probably a lot to do with poor localization - the dialogs are bland and uninspired. The only thing that comes to mind when a character starts speaking is how to skip the scene. That’s quite a disappointment because the game premises are so excellent - story-wise, the first minutes of the game are very intense.

Finally, more story doesn’t mean more plot. By researching more about the game background and writing more about it, it should be possible to allow the player to immerse themselves as deep as they want in the game world, without requiring them to do this and that, go here and there just so that they can see that you’ve done your job right. Even if the extra writing ends up not being directly used in the game, having a well-detailed world adds to the consistency of the game which can never hurt.

If you’re working on a game today, chances are you are not spending enough on writing. Especially if you think you are. Keep in mind how much it costs, compared to your other game assets (say, for the sake of discussion, to your soundtrack - probably nothing. And don’t tell me that your music is more important than your story, who’s going to buy that?). Now think of the impact it can make and start spending more.