I don’t think I’m shilling for everything… I’ve been sailing the seas for as long as I can remember… I just don’t understand why people keep getting surprised at games increasing in price - have you guys forgotten how capitalism works?
Like do you go to your local grocery store and see that cheese has yet again shrunk in size, and increased in price, and then think “this’ll never happen to my precious videogames”?
If so, then I guess I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news
I’m not justifying it anymore than justifying the increase in price of cheese.
But instead of spending your time being angry or annoyed at individual companies. Spend your time being angry with the system that requires the companies to have an ever increasing profit.
And stop being surprised by it, accept that this is a symptom of the capitalism, and if you want change… well, then… it will not happen by itself, and it will not start in the gaming industry.
It’s not worth $80 to me, and that’s also the way prices work. Things are worth what people are willing to pay. I’ve purchased so many games for $20 and less that have given me more enjoyment than any borderlands game.
And that’s completely fair as well, but there will be compromises… because 100DKK is not worth the same 100DKK as for 10 years ago, so as time goes by - the games you’ll be able to buy for 100DKK, will have reduced effort equally to the reduction in value of your currency
I feel like we keep seeing this headline. “AAA studio says current prices can’t support current budgets”
I almost never buy games at $60. I buy everything on sale, and there are constantly sales and way more games than I can play. They can charge whatever they want, I personally will be paying less.
Will the market bear $80 games? Maybe. I feel like a better strategy would be to reign in scope and budget and sell games at prices most people can afford. But who knows?
Yeah, I joke with my friends that game quality is inversely correlated with install size. 100GB+ open world or multiplayer game? Probably mid. 50MB indie game? Probably stays installed for the next 10 years.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was released as a fully finished product that I actually own a physical copy of.
Borderlands 4, will probably be a quarter finished when it released, filled with all kinds of apologies, possibly have micro transactions, and will likely be able to be taken out of my library at some point as it’s digital only.
I hate that you get downvoted for pointing out the reality of the situation.
Relative to the price of everything else, $80 for a AAA videogame is actually reasonable. The problem is that rent has gone up drastically, food has gone up drastically, and our wages have stagnated. Getting pissed off at Gearbox for charging $80 for Borderlands 4, and then paying $15 for a burger and fries without an equal reaction just doesn’t seem sensible to me.
Everything is awful, and videogame devs aren’t the ones stealing all our buying power.
I’m not sure where you’re numbers are coming from, but the inflation calculator I found through Google says that $59 in 1992 is more like $135 today. That’s still a significant increase of course, although I wonder how much publishers benefit from not needing as much physical distribution. After the initial investment selling digital keys on a third-party storefront like Steam should be pure profit, no?
1992 was a very different time with very different market conditions and consumer behaviour for video games. Games used to have a much greater perceived entertainment value, despite their relatively small development budgets compared with today. They were also entirely physical media and renting was still a very common way to play them. From what I remember, it wasn’t the most financially accessible hobby either. Most of my friends growing up didn’t have permanent access to their own gaming console and not everyone that did had all the latest games. Nowadays, the gaming market is completely saturated with high quality titles, most of which are fairly cheap as well if you don’t buy them on release.
In any case: Super Mario Bros 3 came out in 1988 and released 1990 and 1991 for the US and Europe respectively. It also didn’t cost $59 and your inflation calculation seems off…
Except the production costs have also gone down. The development itself is easier thanks to better tooling and developers no longer require putting out physical media (which used to be a pretty significant part of cost).
And there's no excuse for $80 when Clair Obscur released at $50 and is one of the best games released this year. I seriously doubt BL4 will be $30 more impressive than Clair Obscur. How about studio heads do their job and streamline their production process to make better products for lower costs instead of offloading their bloat onto the customers.
The industry is completely different now. The original was made in the 80s where programmers were hard to find and it took 10 of them 2 years and a million dollars to make. Then physical cartridges needed to be made and distributed that only ran on specialized hardware that also needed to be made and distributed. It selling for the equivalent of $180 could be justified since it was niche technology. There’s a reason Biggie Smalls brags about owning a Super Nintendo and a Sega Genesis in a rap song. That shit was expensive even in 1994.
Today, someone can make Super Mario Bros 3 in a month after watching some game dev tutorials on YouTube, upload the .exe to Steam, and sell limitless copies to anyone who owns a computer. Selling it for $180 would be ridiculous. There’s no reason tech today should cost the exact same as it did in the 80s.
you can’t use straight 1:1 inflation to infer what the contemporary cost should be of digital products like video games, movies, tv shows, music etc. There is no physical asset to tie the individual product value to. There are of course production costs, but those are the same whether you make 50 copies or 50 million.
The reason inflation hasn’t hit video game prices is because the video game market has grown exponentially since the 90s. They make more money by selling low margin at higher volume, compared to high margin and low volume. It’s all about maximizing that total profit, not individual sales.
Publishers can try to charge more, but it’ll be up to consumers if that actually gets them any more money overall. only time will tell.
Counterpoint for the general case: games also have a much larger playerbase these days and manufacturing of cartridges and components can be done at much greater economies of scale. In many cases, there is no physical media manufacturing cost to a lot of the sales.
For the specific point: Gearbox/Take2 have lost all faith from me so, while I don't generally mind some games being in that price range, there's zero chance pitchford and his ilk are getting that from me.
Nah. I keep seeing this argument and I really disagree with it. It’s actually really simple economics; we don’t need to calculate inflation into this. If I think the price of something is too high (especially something I don’t need to survive), I don’t buy it. Companies can cry all they want, in the end I don’t care.
It doesn’t seem like you disagree with anything they said?
If everyone followed your lead, the end result would be that video games don’t exist anymore. Just in case you didn’t play that out completely in your mind.
The industry makes something around 190 billion per year, they will be fine without raising their prices to 80$. I ran that in my head considering that I worked in the industry myself. Devs aren’t paid enough not because we don’t pay games enough but because these companies are run by greedy fucks. Don’t feel bad for them, buy games when they are on sale or buy indie games. Games won’t go anywhere be reassured.
It’s “simple economics” to attack people trying to make art and entertainment for having the gall to ever consider increasing their prices, knowing full well that the cost of living has increased drastically? You’re going with “that’s just the market telling them they’re charging too much” while ignoring the reality that rent has doubled - and in some cases tripled - food costs have gone up 50%, and wages have barely improved? It’s the fault of video game developers that you have relatively less money and cannot afford to purchase their product around the other products you need or are expected to purchase?
If your wage increased with the cost of living, you would not see this price as “too high.” But because some price increases are on necessary purchases, we attack the unnessecary ones, like good little capitalists. Adam Smith would be proud.
$60 in 1992 is about $135 in April 2025, inflation included.
Sure games became more complex, but tools became more powerfull, and so did computers.
In 1992 you often had to code your own engine, which amounted for a good chunk of the development cost. They had to do that using a ressource envelope magnitudes smaller than what we have today. Heck, a jpeg screencap of the original Mario game is bigger than the whole original game itself. Let’s not forget that games where physical, which had to be included in the final price.
Todays devs often uses off the shelf engines, tools that automate some of the tedious task, like making trees (Speedtree) and asset reuse is done on an industrial level, there are even marketplaces for that. Moreover, game distribution changed to be mostly digital, you don’t need to factor the medium price into the asked price.
You cannot really compare 1992 dev costs with modern ones. The whole way games are done changed way too much for that.
Moreover, the market has grown way beyond what is was then. The required profit per copy sold is a lot smaller than it was then, and thus should be accojnted for.
Honesty, I don’t see a AAA needing to have more than $60-70 atm, and I think this bump in price is entirely due to the ever increasing marketing cost, more than the game development.
But is it any good? Just because the budget is higher doesn’t mean it’s good. I didn’t like the story and writing of 3 but the rest of the game I enjoyed. I’m kinda expecting the same, hopefully. Every AAA release somehow gets worse every year tho
I could look past the story and enjoy the gameplay. But the game itself still sucked and was very empty. A few months after launch they did an event where each week a different planet had a lot event and you could target items. 3 of the planets only had one or two areas to even farm decent numbers. Most of the game is empty.
Combine that with my own personal issue with Gearbox removing the official forums, (which had years of builds and information going back to BL1) and a certain YouTuber stealing content and using modded weapons and then denying it. I have no interest in BL4.
The old gearbox is dead. Even watching the video it just looks like reused skills. Oh look another character that puts enemies into floating balls, how original.
They’ll probably start it at $80 and be prepared to drop it down if sales are lower than expected. So gamers can tell them that the $80 price point is not ok by being patient and holding off on the purchase.
They’ll still have plenty of people buy it for that shit price if only because they’ll give it free to a bunch of streamers and fomo will get the viewers.
I’ve paid money like that when I could see the effort and love thwt went into the game. I kinda saw that in BL2, but nothing in the series since comes even close.
Sure, it might be $80,why not? Also I might skip it. Or wait for sensible sale like $5 in a bundle. Backlog keeps expanding anyway and I doubt this will be even worth half the rrlease asking price…
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Aktywne