I bought it in Fall 2024 for like 25 bucks with all DLCs. So I’ll wait year or two with BL4 no problem, there’s plenty other games I can play. I never buy brand new games.
Even worse than my backlog, there are all the comfort games I play every few years and which takes me months to complete (cause some of them are fairly long like The Witcher 3) and thanks to my crappy memory, multiple choices and mods I can enjoy them as much every time
I made it so far in that one, I think, then I practically skipped tw2 and went straight for 3 and soon became so hooked. It’s crazy how huge and dense that world is, with scenery that never looks repeated.
Ooh you should give the 2nd another chance, they f’ed up the combat (I think they wanted to copy Souls games) but the story is great and honestly it still looks fine for a 2011 game
It’s more war/politics oriented, and the story is about clearing your name and recovering memory and less about saving someone/the world
If the combat part is the issue, some mods can improve that (or make you hard to kill)
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
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.
They used the No Man’s Sky strategy: release trash, polish it a bit, then get praised for improving while the game is still nowhere near what was promised.
It’s why I’ll never get it unless obtained for the good ol’ price of free. I’m glad people are enjoying it and it’s much improved over the trash pile they delivered! But it’s still a very different game than advertised.
Frankly, it’s concerning how quickly the narrative shifted on this. You’d think with the internet recording the whole fiasco, there wouldn’t be a quick narrative shift and misinformation on the subject, but people have convinced themselves the launch wasn’t that bad, Sony somehow screwed them and this is what they said the game would be!
One’s mileage could vary wildly at launch with that game. It did work just fine for me, with some minimal jank, but I could clearly see the video evidence others had of their bad time.
Oh absolutely. I know it wasn’t super janky for everyone - but the fact is that it was so broken on launch for not just PC, but PS as well. The mass refunds, which Sony has never done, etc. Denying that this was a thing is what the narrative seems to be for many.
I’m glad it worked for you on launch, and hope you had a great time playing it!
They arguably did worse, because NMS didn’t just polish the game, they retroactively added most of the content + didn’t release a paid DLC. Cyberpunk falls short of what has been promised to this day.
I’m not sure what most people were expecting but I finally got around to playing the GOTY edition recently.
I got a game with great characters, writing and story, slightly average gameplay, all shackled to a bizarre open world that completely destroys any pacing and urgency. It really did not need all those fixers and like 150 police mini missions, which detract from it all in a major way.
Having also played Witcher 3, that’s kind of what I was expecting, I guess. I genuinely think CDPR should abandon their open world ideas, because they’re excellent at story telling, but really bad at filler bullshit.
Phantom Liberty ups the package to a flawed masterpiece.
CD Projekt has been building up expectations, previewing intriguing scenes and customizations that never came to pass.
It went to promise real-time AI that would grant over a thousand NPCs a variety of roles and actions that, complete with a day/night cycle, was designed to change up their routines. But as fans began playing, they quickly discovered this wasn’t true.
Then, there are the gameplay and AI issues that hinder the experience. A game like Cyberpunk 2077 runs on crime, and CD Projekt promised realistic interactions with the police. One would fully expect officers to come running if a crime was committed out in the open with witnesses, or even in a remote alleyway. Sadly, there is nothing realistic about a bunch of cops spawning unexpectedly around the player with guns firing – especially if no one even witnessed the crime.
Basically all of the marketing turned out to be lies and the game that CDPR promised never existed.
I think the main issue people have is that they got Peter Molyneux’d on it. Which is fair enough, and why I don’t really read much about games before I play them.
I’m glad I held off until PL came out, because it looks like the 2.0 update fixed a lot of things that would irritate me, like gear and levelling blocking off missions. It does rob you of a sense of progression, but I’ll trust their decision to drop that.
There’s enough RPG elements to get in the way of it being a shooter, but not enough to actually satisfy anybody who wanted a full blown RPG. Decisions especially are very binary and I gave up on the platinum trophy after seeing I’d have to save a guy I let die about 60 hours of gameplay ago, in a save long since overridden.
I guess I’ve been around the block enough times to filter out any claims of amazing AI and day/night cycles. We’ve heard those claims before with Fable and Oblivion, and all it really meant is “the shops shut at night”. And here it didn’t even do that, at least beyond a handful of locations where you had to press a button to wait until they opened before you could do the quest inside.
I think I’ve had a lot better experience going into this late and blind.
Patches mean we’re no longer in the days of bad games being bad forever, but they’re certainly remembered that way.
That’s funny, I would point put the amazing gameplay in particular as their no. 1 selling point, if I had to choose anything. But the discussion what’s good and what’s bad aside, they just didn’t deliver on their promises.
I was fed the story of a GTA contender. A life-sim where your choices matter, starting with your origin story, which was supposed to already have great impact. And what does reality look like? Well, your origin story gets you a different tutorial mission and you get a few extra dialog options that do nothing. Your character always behaves exactly the same outside of that and it changes nothing about the story. It’s hardly even referenced by other characters at all, something Mass Effect and Dragon Age did better forever ago. The one big difference I noticed is that Jackie matters even less to you as corpo, which makes all the emotional stuff feel even more out of place and awkward, since you lose the offrenda mission. Hurray.
As for life-sim aspects, you can eat in some select few cut scenes, otherwise eating is useless and doesn’t even come with generic animations. You cannot even eat your useless food at a stall in the city or have a drink at the countless bars in the game just for fun. Except for cutscenes and in your, save for the wardrobe, useless apartment of course. You can also take a useless shower, or wait in bed instead of literally anywhere else. Wow.
You can randomly date a select few characters out of nowhere by choosing a random dialogue option. At least this yields you an almost sex-scene and a bonus quest… Followed by optional, awkward staring in your apartment and no further impact at all. Funnily enough your gender has a greater impact on the game than your backstory that way.
NPCs are generally dumb and you can’t really interact much with them at all. Police is dumb and easily outsmarted as well, but also always punishes you by death for anything. MaxTac is really tough actually and beating them yields you… Nothing! Nothing at all.
You do get a couple of choices throughout the story, but do they really change all that much? I would argue no, they don’t. Most of the time they cause some characters you barely know to live or die. Not the really important ones of course! We need those and there aren’t that many. I think one of the most interesting interactions in the entire game is the one with the ranom Natwatch guy, because you can’t really forsee the consequences for once.
Then there are a couple of different endings, some of which are actually hard to find. I think in retrospective, they are the main thing, besides the very varied gameplay, offering replay-value. The thing is, you don’t need to replay the game to see them all.
Is Cyberpunk trash? No, of course not, I’ve had my fair share of fun. I’m actually in my third playthrough to do liberty city, because everyone says it’s amazing. As for the main game only, I can’t help but be disappointed by the countless things this game doesn’t do. Including many low hanging fruits.
I don’t get why they don’t just have like, install cards with cheaper but slower storage on them for smaller game devs or extra large games that require installation to the system first before it can run. Seems like the in-between of key cards and full speed game cards which still might be faster than downloads and also helps game preservation by having the game actually on the card. Kind of like CD ROM or floppy disc games on PC.
It’s even worse. All the people who defend the physical editions do it because when servers close, they can still play the game. A game key card is just a glorified digital release. When the servers close, you’ll have a piece of plastic.
This is partly the case for any game that receives significant updates as well. Your disc/cart contains 1.0, but is that the version you will want to play 50 years from now when you can't download updates anymore?
I would encourage you to support GoG before you have to rely on them, otherwise if everyone does like you they may not be able to sustain their business.
It’s a bit akin to waiting for a crash before putting your seatbelt on.
If GOG benefitted Linux users as much as steam does then Yea, I’d be throwing cash at them every payday. I love GOG and what they do, but I also need to show support for what valve is doing for Linux too.
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