It’s funny how it’s “the game’s are not expensive enough” and not “we don’t know how to manage our or money” or “our profit are too high”. Fuck those capitalists.
Oh the stupid shit head “games are 100 times more expensive to make now” but you sell thousands times more and there no physical media anymore is irrelevant I guess… Assholes…
Whose fault is that, guys? Were those numbers placed on you by a witch’s curse? No. You spent $100M on one game, it made $300M, so you spend $200M on the next game. Games didn’t get twice as hard to make, between those decisions. They didn’t require twice as many people or twice as much time. You’re just treating them like a factory where more capital in means more revenue out.
The original Doom was made in nine months by a team that fits in an elevator. Yeah, it’s simpler than modern games, but they had to make the nearly-unprecedented engine and all their own tools as they went. It’s not like anything’s harder, now. People have basically recreated that seminal title as solo one-week game jam projects. A modern handful of professional computer nerds can pick from a handful of modern high-end toolchains and start banging out content, today.
If the market for video games only supported six-digit budgets - there would still be video games. Big ones, fancy ones, creative ones, whatever. Would they be the spectacles that currently get advertised to death? Nope. But they also wouldn’t produce as many unstable bug-fests as those sprawling mega-projects. Nor would they be announced in 1999, previewed in 2006, delayed in 2017, and launched to middling reviews in 2025.
Studios that aren’t injected with obscene capital and forced to deliver “AAA” money-trees tend to shoot their shot and move on to the next game. That’s how they survived and grew as plucky little private affairs, before some publishers swallowed them whole and turned them into a sequel factory for their breakout hit.
If your games cost too much money to fail, stop giving them more money.
And the fun part is, you’ve still had a decades long lifestyle of having low prices by exploiting weak labour laws in poor countries! And if they raise prices by using your local labour you’ll still cry capitalism. Isn’t it fun?
More resources are put in because there is an incredible amount of money to make with the game industry being bigger than movies and music combined. It’s no longer a niche upcoming industry but mainstream. And companies put in those resources because the market is that much bigger with more potential return on investment.
Game would $100 but the same as they are now. Could be $200 and it’d be the same as they are now and still have mtx, since why would a company leave the option to get more money. Few companies operate with the approach of this is enough money we are content.
And games have only gotten worse if you are looking at triple a titles the same way someone might say movies have gotten worse because they think high budget super hero movies are the only ones that exist.
If the market could sustain $100 it would be, but barrier to making and releasing games has never been lower. So consumers would just move to alternative games that are cheaper or old titles they haven’t gotten around to. And worst of all to these comlanies the top sellers aren’t always these high budget titles, but some indie title that’s not even 3d. Then there’s game pass people would just turn to if game prices went up moving more people to subscription.
Most companies needing $100 per unit for a game to be profitable aren’t going to bother approving that type of game to begin with over a game that can be priced $100 and have much broader mainstream appeal.
Why would a company want to risk putting money into a game so niche it needs $100 per unit over a game that can make more money despite being priced $60. And you know… Just price it $100.
If a game today came with a nice solid box, a cloth map, a 250 page manual that actually explains almost everything about the mechanics of the game, and WAS FUCKING FINISHED WHEN I BUY IT, getting maybe one patch and otherwise never changing, then I might be willing to pay more.
The ability to patch games has been a huge improvement, but it has also caused most games to release in state that is worse than older games ever were. Maybe after 6 months to anyear a modern game is at a comparable level of finish to older games, but only if it sold well. Lots of games don’t get the patching they need.
Yes Mario 64 has a lot of glitches, but it’s playable all the way through. Similarly superman 64 is notable for being a buggy Ness because it was uncommon. BG3 released with multiple game breaking bugs, same with Stanfield. Payday 3 has several crashing bugs, but nothing gamebreaking beyond overloaded servers.
The MSRP for Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges in the mid-80s, adjusted to today’s U.S. Dollar, would average around $150-200.
I don’t think games should cost that much, but we stuck with the $60 price point for literal decades so it’s not completely unreasonable for someone to talk about raising prices.
(I also write this while having only bought one game? two? In the past year.)
Resident Evil 2 sold about 4.5 million copies on PS One, Resident Evil 2 Remake has sold around 12.5 million copies so far and climbing.
They’re making more money now than they ever did, even with games costing more to make. More customers is supposed to equal economy of scale, not fuck it lets charge out the ass so executives can make more money than they’ve ever made in history.
The economy of scale is what lets companies operate at higher costs. According to Wikipedia RE2 cost about $1 million to make. $1m might still buy a PS1 caliber game, but the remake cost at least an order of magnitude more. Many games now cost nine figures; GTA6 apparently cost $1 billion.
I’m not saying games should haphazardly inflate with everything else for the sake of share holders, but I’m open to the idea that the formula used twenty years ago to decide that AAA games should cost $60 might be out of date.
That formula has to include charging what the market will bear. They can certainly increase the price and sell fewer copies, and maybe that’ll be more profitable for them in the end, but they certainly can’t jack up the price and assume all their current customers will stump up to grow their profits.
People’s income hasn’t increased all that much, the wealth gap in many countries has only grown. Games cost more when they were a niche product, and cost less when the audience and potential sales grew. Maybe they’d prefer their billion dollar industry went back to being more niche and only for the wealthy.
Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don't have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.
If selling at the current rate wasn't profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.
Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don’t have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.
Certainly a factor that should be included in determining what a game costs, as is the 30% off the top taken by Steam, Microsoft, and Sony for most digital sales. Distribution in 2023 was not a factor in determining the current max price for a standard edition non-sports game, which was set in the early 00s.
I’m also comfortable seeing games that cost less to produce carrying lower price tags, as in many cases they do, Hades and Hi-Fi Rush coming to mind.
If selling at the current rate wasn’t profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.
They continue to make $60 games, yes. No one can say whether some company would have made the greatest game of all time last year if they’d been able to sell it for $70, or $80 or $100. Maybe they’re making it now as GTA6.
Ah, sorry. It stands for “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price.”
In the U.S. the law doesn’t allow a manufacturer to require that retailers sell their product at a particular price, but they’re free to “suggest” one so that’s how we ended up with the MSRP.
It doesn’t carry any real weight, but it generally serves to anchor consumer expectations for a product’s value. (It also gives retailers an easy metric to compare sale prices against.)
The problem is the game industry, in the meantime of never going beyond the $60 threshold, found a far far more lucrative way of making money than just raising the MSRP. In fact, they found multiple ways of making money: skinner boxes, loot boxes, micro transactions, season passes, FOMO storefronts, etc etc. And even though we may agree that the MSRP eventually has to increase, they won't suddenly give up on those anti-consumer, predatory practices.
It’s not unreasonable but at the end of the day, we buy these games to waste time. There’s not a whole lot of justifying why im going to spend more on something i use to just unwind when i can buy plenty of 20$ games that will give me hundreds of hours of entertainment
I get that and i bough baldurs gate full price on release, but as the games start creeping up past 70 to like 100, it’s like for what? I can just not spend this money. It’s not like a car i need to get to work and car prices were skyhigh last summer and fall for example, or food, etc. If gaming companies cant compete on wages with other tech businesses that need programmers, they’re just gonna have to make do with less manpower. Long winded way of saying inelastic market.
Adjusted price is a common talking point here, but it ignores the other side of inflation... that wages have stagnated and rising prices obviously means that people have less spending money.
Consider also that there is a lot of choice with the back catalog on PC as well as free games (that people can make in their spare time at no cost thanks to FOSS tools and free information). Pre-broadband, gaming was more of a take-it-or-leave situation.
So yeah, I think most people already see increasing prices as being motivated by greed. And some people likely see the $60 price as already greedy when games are often filler and spectacle (with poor QA testing on top of that, because they know people will pre-order it anyway, and then buy the later DLC or cosmetics).
They sell vastly more games than before. And there isn’t a media anymore. And they should have increased their productivity in all these years.
Video games are not a good. They’re a digital product, a service. The cost is completely decorrelated from the amount you sell. Which is why it is so profitable.
The MSRP for a NES cartridge includes the circuits, the manual, the box, the physical space, the license and a finished game. Do you get any of these with modern AAA games?
To be fair, he is partially right. It’s insane that games have basically been the same price since forever, the only reason they stayed the same is cuz more people could afford computers/consoles and in contrast to every other industry, making a new either physical or digital copy of a game is dirt cheap, so the more users the more profit.
Idk if it actually makes sense for games to be more expensive yet tho.
Prices are comparable because a cartridge in the 90s was as expensive, comparatively, as an SSD is today. Have you ever bought a game and received a free SSD with it?
You also have to ignore economies of scale. Nintendo was a huge consumer of chips globally just for gaming. That market is now mature, and gaming isn’t as big of a piece as it used to be. There’s also way more games being sold now, call of duty gets more day one sales than most n64 games ever sold, which made disc’s super cheap. Now you have digital distribution which is practically free, and companies are getting more of a games price than ever before and it’s still not enough.
Personally, I feel that game prices are too high. Patient gaming is where I’m at.
Besides all of that, I don’t have the time for all of these games maybe cut down the scope of the game, go back to linear, 10-20 hour games and if its an open world don’t make it a huge empty sandbox with most of it being unused or with a boring game loop. If a game publisher decides to jack up prices then I expect top notch quality with no fluff included anywhere and that it works day one the fact that I have to mention that is sad, then and only then to me such a high price would be justified which has not been the case for some games in recent years. Finally, if a full priced game incorporates f2p monetization and battle passes, then to me its price increase is not justified in my book.
Man I have no idea what will happen now. Will he diminish the amount of dicks in our salad or dress it up better? His pay must be insane to be putting up with the current state of blizzard.
You know what, I’ll bite. For this to work though, let’s agree on two things. First, the game they’re selling shouldn’t be a hot pile of garbage on day one. Second, I don’t want to even catch a whiff of microtransactions or subscription based models. If we can nail those down, I would be fine with a price increase. As it stands, the sticker price is just the cost of entry in the vast majority of games. They are still bringing in cash well after the initial purchase.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne