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.
Unfortunately considering how many of these gamers are willing to pay extra $30€ just to get 1 week earlier access to a game, I'm afraid you are wrong in this regard and we're going to see prices go up even more. Piracy is also dying, either because of groups disbanding or getting sued, or because of DRM getting better and more widespread, and once that is gone it's going to let publishers jack the price even higher up.
I'm pretty much resigned to just play indie and AA games at this point, there's no way I'm paying 60 or more for these broken, bloated and often overpriced products. There are few exceptions but even they will be driven to higher prices eventually.
I pretty much exclusively buy AA at this point, with the rare AAA nintendo 1st party title that I'm happy to pay $60 for. Most AAA games though just aren't worth it. Some of those games coming out you couldn't pay me to play.
There are so many tbh, really depends on what type of games you're interested in. I've really enjoyed remnant 1 and 2, owlcat pathfinder games, VRising, Riftbreaker, Timberborn, Against the Storm for example. All made by good dedicated studios that deserve your money more than EA, bioware, actiblizz or other corpos like that. Of the older titles, FTL, Into the Breach, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Project Zomboid etc are classics - polished games made with love that put pretty much every AAA title to shame in comparison.
Because it’s still a mobile game and there’s no way it’s a great experience trying to play it on such a small screen.
I honestly don’t understand the smartphone gaming fad because of the screen size issue. Who actually plays games like this on their phone that wouldn’t rather buy a dedicated steam deck or other device?
I know that Diablo isn’t a Capcom game, but if industry leaders are looking at $90 games with battle passes and in game purchases for $20 horse armor is “too low”, then we are truly fucked.
Games in the 90’s were almost the equivalent of $100 today. They seemed better, though, and people seem to play them longer, but that’s all probably just rose-tinted glasses
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.
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.
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.
I understand he’s mad that he’s losing money of a thing he made but, I think he’s going about that the wrong way. I would see that as more of a challenge then a “wow I shouldn’t do this”, I expect any person doing stuff like this would look at it the same way, free cracks and exploits are rarely about the money, it’s generally about the challenge of doing something that isn’t supposed to be allowed. Adding “mines” to try and sabotage it I believe will just make someone more apt to try and crack it.
In Mirror’s Edge one of the jumps near the end of the game was programmed to be actually undoable. It slowed you down, just a little bit, so it was now impossible to complete the game.
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