So many studios sold to massive companies to “ensure their future” in the last few years, but now that the zero interest era* is over, they’re being cut.
Yeah- tbh I can understand why they’d want to do something appreciative for the Day Ones but the Day Ones also could’ve bought it on Steam at the time.
My friend told me about this earlier and that’s exactly what I thought. They knew this wouldn’t be popular and would drop the value so they sold before the announcement, that’s got to be insider trading
Now the share price will drop and he will buy his share back at a discount. Then they will revert the policy and share prices will rise. Boom! Free monies!
I think the part where they had a trend of selling over the course of a year makes this not insider trading (or harder to prove if they were playing the long game).
They probably have automated sell of dates or automated sell of prices.
This is part of a consistent pattern over the last year.
He probably hasn’t bought any stocks due to receiving stock as part of his employment contract.
It could be insider trading, but considering how companies have been doing pricing structures and rapid shifts from free to subscription based and then seeing sales/profit increase I imagine it’s worth it for them to simply keep the stock long term, but an initial sell off was put in place at a certain price. Sometimes there’s smoke and there’s fire, and sometimes it’s just simply the fumes of capitalism creating a system that’s uniquely imbalanced for everyone else, but isn’t really insider trading.
I feel like a scheduled sell shouldn’t mean insider trading investigation is off the table.
Does it really matter if they decided to sell just before they devalue their company, or they devalued their company right after a sell? They knew about both before hand, and they can have the same intent either way.
I suppose, but that’s a different crime under a different statute Im guessing. (Tanking the company because gou have a scheduled sell, versus selling because you tanked the company.)
They’ve been consistently selling off stock for the last year as noted in the article. Many of these execs get paid in a combination of cash and shares. To get their full wage they sell shares.
No, as the article says they’ve been doing it all year. Many execs and important employees often get paid a big chunk of their wage in stock. To get cash they need to sell stock.
I know it’s lazy as hell, but I’m shocked how much I’m enjoying it in spite of that. Its real flaw is the shortage of courses, one that probably won’t get much better because the OG F-Zero didn’t have much variety either.
I recently played through Dredge, and enjoyed it so much I went ahead and spent the time to unlock all the achievements. I saw the news of this delay on Steam, and was really glad that pretty much all the comments there were praising the studio for not pushing something incomplete out just to hit a deadline, and encouraging them to take all the time they need.
Fair enough. Still, games used to be vastly cheaper in my country and the asking price for the basic version of Starfield is 80 USD. There is no way any game is worth this much of my income.
Like I said. The price tag on Donkey Kong from 1994 says 799sek which in today’s market is worth 66 usd. I can’t be arsed to follow index and calculate how much that was in -94 but it’s a lot more than Starfield.
My only point here is that games haven’t really increased in price ever. Anyone claiming it has, is wrong. We can discuss the other parameters all day with (un)finished products, mtx, bugs, paid dlc etc. The fact still stands that games in 2023 haven’t vastly increased in price at all. And we have a lot of free options now as well that didn’t exist back in the ninetees.
In 1994 you were buying a physical, manufactured product which you owned.
Now you are temporarily licensing access to something that doesn’t exist, can’t be transferred or resold or backed up or modified, has unlimited reproduction potential for no cost, and sells at scales unimaginable in 1994 dwarfing all other consumer markets in total revenue.
The expense was probably quite considerable. Not only do you have to have the game ROM on a chip, you would also need Nintendo's lockout chip too. If your game had a battery save system (DKC did) you would also need to buy a RAM chip and watch battery too. That's ignoring any enhancement chips as DKC didn't use any (but many other late generation games did).
And all that before you get to the fact that the only who could officially make these boards was Nintendo. Meaning there isn't exactly much competition driving prices down. Sure, Nintendo couldn't quite take the piss the way they could in the NES days, as Sega was all too eager to try and attract new games for its console, but unless you wanted to completely remake your game, you're dealing with the big N's bullshit.
The boards could probably have been made much cheaper today than in the 90s, as ROM memory was expensive AF, even the couple-of-MB ones used in the consoles of the day.
There's a reason PS1 and Saturn games were massively cheaper to buy than N64 games.
If you buy a game today, does it come with a free SSD to install it in? Does it have a paper manual and a nice box? Is it even finished? Games aren’t cheaper, you’re just getting scammed.
I remember getting Donkey Kong on release for the Super Nintendo and it was more expensive than most games are right now, 66 usd. Name one thing that has the same price in 2023 that it did I 1994. It’s insane.
My dad still reminds me that when he bought me Dr. Mario for NES on release, it was $90USD. I remember seeing many a game at Toys R Us with price tags of up to $120.
But I can name plenty of games in 2023 that cost more $66. Shittons of console titles are $70 now!
Apparently you’re illiterate because I was asking how that makes them cheaper. None of those things matter in the slightest and would only cost marginally more to produce.
$70 is still more than $66, regardless of that unnecessary shit.
You’re arguing that media used to play (i.e. a FUCKING SSD in 2023) costs marginally more? Find me an SSD that could fit Sea of Thieves for less than 25 USD (and isn’t trash). If you’re a shill, delete your account.
How is this part of the discussion? What did a SNES cost? This doesn’t matter. Consoles and hardware always costs money. We are talking about the games here. Or do you want to take in to account what a decent TV cost in 1994 as well? And the second gamepad? We can’t compare life as a whole. Saleries. Living cost. Everything matters, yes. But then we can just end the discussion right here and right now because we will never arrive at anything but ifs and buts.
We aren’t talking about the “console” used to run the motherfucking game, or some peripheral. A game for SNES comes with it’s own fucking storage – the bloody cartridge – while a modern digital game doesn’t. If you can’t get two neurons to fire at the same time, then the discussion really is over.
Digital games and physical games are the same price on the Nintendo Switch. They were the same on the Wii U, the Wii as well. Nintendo never stopped selling physical games. It’s the same on PlayStation as well with the same price. At least it was on my Ps4. The larger piece of plastic didn’t cost more in the 90s compared to the smaller piece of plastic in 2023. The manual/handbook also didn’t cost anything noteworthy to produce back then. I really don’t know where you are pulling these costs from.
Holy fuck, imagine being so completely alienated from the process of creating technology that you believe pressing disks costs the same as soldering circuits.
OIC… You’re just an absolute dingus who has no fucking clue what they are on about. Cartridges were only slightly more to produce than a CD, and Nintendo still makes their games on cartridges (fancier ones than the SNES, too) that cost the same as the digital release. The only time this wasn’t true was during the 64 era, when an earthquake shut down the manufacturers of the carts and fucked up production. Do you work for Capcom? I feel like you’d fit in.
I buy physical copies of ps4 games for under $10 pretty regularly. You can find some absurd sales if you know where to look and how to keep an eye out.
Rare spent 18 months developing Donkey Kong Country from an initial concept to a finished game, and according to product manager Dan Owsen, 20 people worked on it in total. It cost an estimated US$1 million to produce, and Rare said that it had the most man hours ever invested in a video game at the time, 22 years. The team worked 12–16-hours every day of the week.
The Donkey Kong you bought in 1994 had to pay not only for development, but also for the package, for the circuits (think a 1TB SSD in 2023), for distribution, etc. Do you see modern companies having to pay for any of that?
You seem to miss the point it was almost 30 years ago and they spend 18 months developing with a team of 20 people. Read those numbers again. Damn, the electrical bills alone to create Starfield most probably surpasses the entire development cost of a handful of SNES games combined. Yes, old games had manuals and came in physical form but those components where cheap at the time.
I’m not saying game SHOULD cost more. I’m just claiming games haven’t become a lot more expensive.
As much as I don’t want to see game prices increase, I’ve been shocked to see that they haven’t kept up with inflation at all. Especially since the cost of developing games has skyrocketed.
I honestly don’t know if this is a good or bad thing. Metzen is charismatic and seems like a nice person, but wasn’t he part of the old guard that oversaw/neglected/enabled the sexual harassment environment?
Are you talking about RE4? Because they were actually talking about an Apple port (iPhone, iPad and Mac, with people being able to play on all platforms with one purchase) of the recent remake, which is a 2023 game that only really borrows the story and some layouts from the 2005 game.
And even then it only borrows the bullet points of the story. I prefer the approach they took with this game compared to say FF7’s where the story definitely feels like it’s improved if you are more familiar with the original.
Are you referring to FF7 remake’s? Because you definitely get more out of it if you’ve played the previous games and watched the movie since it’s quite literally a sequel to them. I really enjoy their approach to it.
I’m not saying RE4’s isn’t the case either. I just don’t think it’s a one or the other kind of scenario and they’re a little different as to why as well.
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.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne