The problem that they're not considering is that if they raise the prices, more people are going to be priced out of buying the games, and will resort to piracy. The cost of living is absurd right now, and I can only afford a handful of $60 games a year.
I'm not going to argue the ethics of piracy, because the point is that a lot of people will do it if they otherwise cannot afford to buy games. Also, some games just never really go down in price, especially if you're talking nintendo. To this day Breath of the Wild is still $60 if bought new or digitally.
Poor management is the problem. Your overhead has nothing to do with us. You suck at business and cutting jobs is all you do.
Games are not worth more by any means. The market is saturated and AAA games release unfinished and you still make your profits and bonuses.
The problem are the elite shitbags who go to elite schools and get cherry picked by other elite shitbags who continue the cycle of enshittification of the world rather than hiring good hard working Americans within that KNOW their industry and the products where people like Tim Apple and whoever this Capcom CEO ding dong do not at all.
I want to mention the concept of consumer surplus since it’s a lesser known economic principle compared to supply and demand.
Put simply, everyone has a price. A static price like $60 will get everyone willing to pay over $60. Some will be willing to pay $90, some $120, and so forth. The latest developments on pricing take advantage of that with horse armor, as those are folks with a higher threshold. On the other end of the spectrum, you have 50% to 90% sales to get the rest of us. Flexible pricing is the main reason companies are doing well, especially in an age of growing economic disparity. Just ask the whales how much they spend!
That said, saying the base price should go up neglects the broader economic situation everyone is in, and the US and Japan hasn’t seen their baseline go up. Sadly, companies should know this, that’s why prices vary by county. Ever buy a game from a Brazilian website? Much cheaper.
Tldr, dudes a short sighted twat, companies already optimize prices.
IT'S ALMOST AS IF THERE IS A DEFINED SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS THAT'S SUCKING MONEY FROM THE ECONOMY
Less infighting, more eating of the rich. Pay the devs, not the landlords. The capitalism system is broken and breaking further. The cost of goods is defined by how much workers need to be paid to make it, and then multiplicatively inflated by how much greed that BILLIONAIRE CLASS wants.
Government is for the people, by the people, that's the ONLY reason it exists. People in, and that want to be the billionaire class have declared war on the rest of us, and it's the government's sole purpose to protect the well-being and will of the people.
The government MUST serve the people.
If it can't, the highest priority is it MUST be fixed immediately.
The longer we flail and wait, the more that obviously hostile class of people grow in power and make fixing this a more and more serious issue.
Like any good leader, if you are failing in your duties, you must self-correct, elect an adequate replacement, or you must be removed, by your own will or by force.
Because life-time is too precious to waste waiting for the conflict to come to a head and burst.
That hostile class is doing everything possible to prevent any of this. Calm down, diffuse, obfuscate, confuse, project, gaslight, lie, cheat, steal, destroy, and gain power to RULE above the-will-of-the-people: the government.
if you dropped game to $30 from $60, would double or more people buy it? or would too many people see the lower price and think it must be a shitty game to be 'that low' and pass on it?
I loved that first Wargroove, and I held off on playing it for so long because I thought the changes they made to commanders wouldn't be to my liking. It turns out I actually prefer this to Advance Wars, as it solves a lot of problems with pacing and balance that Advance Wars had. It also had absolutely none of the bullshit that Advance Wars and (at least the old) Fire Emblem games had in their later missions where they'd just spawn new units out of nowhere and wipe out your forces with no ability for you to know it was coming without reloading the save. So imagine my surprise when I went back to read reviews, and they criticized Wargroove 1 for both of those things. I can only sit here scratching my head, wondering if the game I played was very different after patches than what people played at launch, because those were egregious issues in Advance Wars 20 years earlier as well.
I don’t think he’s wrong. AAA game prices have been basically the same for 20+ years, while the cost of making games has only gone up. I think this is why a lot of publishers push for progressively more aggressive microtransactions, which can often hide the actual price of the game’s content. And greed but that’s kind of their job.
The idea that BG3 and Overwatch 2 released at the same price point is actually ludicrous. With AAA games, the price is standard and if you don’t like the game, oh well fuck you. And I would absolutely pay extra for games from developers which invested more, and had a higher standard of quality. Larian could charge $100 for their next CRPG and I’d be all in. Similarly, I don’t think minimally viable cash grab titles or smaller, maybe more experimental titles should release for more than like $30.
I think the indie scene does this pretty well but it’s a challenge for AAA, and consumers are somewhat to blame. I think people would balk more at an $80 standard price than a $60 half-complete game with $4k of microtransactions. So of course, studios are going to go with the latter strategy, even though plenty of people hate it.
AAA wouldn't remove macrotransactions to counter the higher price, they would just charge more for the game and keep everything the same. The current generation has been conditioned by mtx, it's no longer a whale problem. it's a norm that the average consumer accepts and buys into, which has fucked the industry.
Overwatch was priced at $40 on launch, it was just multiplayer after all. They priced it brilliantly and the mtx they had were pointless and non-invasive, a far cry to what that game has devolved into these days. Overwatch '2' was a forced patch which turned the game free-to-play and added all the aforementioned cancer mtx.
BG3 is $60, without any mtx. So I don't really understand the point you are making at all, it is just false that they were priced the same, BG3 didn't need to cost more, if it's cheaper it's more accessible to more people and the volume of sales makes up for the lower price, don't forget (like they want you to) there are a LOT more people playing and buying games now than 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Games are half-baked because people's standards have dropped and they will just buy half-baked shit, people still pre-order digital games... or they buy special editions to let them play the game 3 days early or whatever, the situation we are in is the fault of mindless consumption, not the fact game prices haven't significantly increased.
Until AAA games can remove the predatory monetisation, and gain our trust back, we should not be agreeing to be charged more. These companies aren't struggling, they are turning over record profits. Support indie developers, fuck AAA.
What this CEO and you conveniently forget is the fact, that there are more Games sold every year. Since those are digital goods and copy costs are near zero, those companies are making more money each year already. They also pretty much killed the ability to sell used Games, except for Console Games with a physical medium.
Also: why should the consumers have to pay for the ballooning Overhead that those companies have? Don’t tell me you need a hundred million dollars in your marketing department to sell a GOOD/GREAT game. That is Bullshit.
I'm not disagreeing with you by saying this, but I can imagine Apple sweetening the prospect by adding an AppleTV "Pro" to the ecosystem that will play intensive iPhone games like this with controller support. Tack-on MacOS playability as well and 1 purchase could mean you can play your save no matter where you are, across any platform within the ecosystem. Again, not saying this will happen. Just imagining how it could go.
I think that’s definitely what’s going to happen. The gaming market is going to see some huge disruption in the next few years as companies who didn’t want to bother with the console market can start an ecosystem based around platform agnostic stores/ecosytems.
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Aktywne