Neither Cyberpunk nor Starfield are rushing to win any awards for their writing. I’m playing the expansion for Cyberpunk at the moment and it’s average at best.
Just remember that with game pass growth, more attention will be put on the xbox ecosystem overall, including the xbox launcher & marketplace app. So I’m not sure games are more likely to go to Steam than before.
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but I’m open to the idea that the formula used twenty years ago to decide that AAA games should cost $60 might be out of date.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?
Wait, they rehashed a Super Nintendo game from thirty years ago, and didn’t even launch with all of its dozen levels? The original weighed less than a megabyte! Opening day should’ve been every track from all two of the 2D F-Zero games Nintendo ever made.
Weirdly, I have to defend against the idea they killed F-Zero. They did exactly what they intended with it, from the get-go: they showed off new hardware with a previously-impossible sense of speed. Once for SNES planecasting, once for N64 z-buffering, once for GBA planecasting, and once for Gamecube fillrate.
Every other F-Zero game is third-party.
Nintendo is a toy company. If a product is not novel, they are not interested. That’s why every Mario Kart has some stupid gimmick. Even in the first one, splitscreen multiplayer was the stupid gimmick. They shipped F-Zero and realized the SNES had a second controller… but no two-player games. Shrinking the courses to a static tilemap required smaller scale and lower speed, hence tiny karts. Really take a moment to consider that: even by 1992, F-Zero was not fit for purpose. It no longer achieved what Nintendo makes games for. Doing it again would not be impressive. Doing it again would not be novel. And the fact it’s easy to cram endless bullshit into Mario Kart is why that franchise keeps getting releases, while F-Zero collected dust - until they picked this online clusterfuck gimmick.
But the fact this retro game-as-a-service (ptoo!) couldn’t be arsed to include even one game’s whole level set, when each track must take less space than this comment, is baffling.
Everything will be damaged as “Line Go Up” becomes every industry’s mantra. Nothing will get better, expect worse and worse product quality on average.
Want that couch? It’ll take your sim 4 real time weeks to earn it with their pay, or you could just spen $15 in real dollars and get it now. Another for the guest room, or because you lost the first in a cooking fire? $15 more, please.
I feel like we’re seeing the culmination of Apple’s efforts to get devs to use Metal.
When they released their toolkit in June, I thought it would be to get gaming just on Macs. I think now it’s a lot more likely that they wanted devs to convert games to work on their phones and tablets.
A lot more people have iPhones than have Macs or even Xboxs or gaming PCs or PS5s. If you can get people buying console games on Apple Silicon and you have devs converting their games to work with this massive, already-extant market, then you’ve just made a ton of money.
Think about how attractive that is if you’re someone who only wants to play a resident evil here or a warframe there. With crossplay you can play with your friends no matter where they are and now you can play it on your phone that probably makes the game look better than your PS4. Definitely better than your switch. Well maybe you don’t think about getting the new PlayStation because you only buy a couple games each generation, good thing your Apple TV can run those games too so you might as well just save the money and play on that with your PS4 or Xbox controller.
Very cool. I’m all for having my games everywhere and getting to play wherever I choose. And this is all very shrewd decisions on Apple’s part
With the Switch 2 rumours and 8 Deluxe ending it’s DLC soon I imagine it won’t be long before MK9, maybe even a launch title for the Switch 2 depending on when it launches
True Mario kart 8 is peak Mario kart. I feel like they’re either going to keep adding content to it or do something new with the franchise like double dash did.
This is the mobile game rather than one for console. There could be one for Switch 2, but they haven’t even finished the DLC pass for 8 yet so it’s likely a ways off.
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