The official page shows the money you’ve spent, the estimator shows the current price of the games on your account, adjusted to everything. For me the difference is X4
They want $100 for this. They are trying to make games expensive again.
In my mind, the bigger and more expensive the dev team, the more likely the business people are to be involved. Those business types really know how to suck fun and fairness out of games in an attempt to turn it into unbridled profits.
Buy a handful of games from small independent studios instead of this if you feel similarly to me.
They’d ask $1000 for it if they thought people will pay it. No one at Take Two or Rockstar has said this. Most likely is they’ll do that $100 “advance access” thing that a lot of AAA games like to do, where you get the game a few days early. The business hasn’t gotten in the way of the fun or fairness of the campaign mode for Rockstar’s previous efforts, and if it did this time, we’ll certainly hear about it immediately.
Inflation adjusted Mario 64 cost in 2022 = $111.91
Inflation adjusted Mario 64 budget in 2022 = ~$2.91mil
Cost of “Elden Ring” on release = $59.99
Estimated dev. budget for Elden Ring = $100mil-200mil
Mario 64 units sold = ~12mil
Elden Ring units sold = ~28mil
These details are provided without comment. You do the math and decide whether the fact that prices haven’t changed since 1996 might be the reason for some of the enshitification we continue to see.
And now for the comment:
Consumers are horrifyingly resistant to price increases for games. It is directly responsible for many of the shitty monetization models we’ve seen. Development budget continue to rise, even on indie games, while consumers pay less and less in “real money value” over time.
It’s completely unsustainable and the very reason the “business types” get involved, forcing unpopular monetization schemes
While that may be true, the costs and budgets we’re dealing with today are orders of magnitude higher than they were back then. Physical product manufacturing doesn’t even come close to making up the difference when you factor in digital storefront costs.
And yet, these days I am finding better games, made by smaller teams, for lower prices (usually between $30-40) from indie devs. The cost ain’t the reason for enshittification, and paying a higher price will not mean we get better games.
If you like bigger games, and plenty do, them charging a higher price for it up front makes it more likely that they’re made sustainably. If a game costs $100M to make, the difference between breaking even on $70 versus $60 is hundreds of thousands of additional customers.
I simply chose two big, well known, and beloved titles for the sake of expediency.
This problem is not unique to big budget games.
Indie devs are getting screwed too. You saying that you’ve found great games for $30-40 from indie devs isn’t an argument against more sustainable pricing like you think it is.
If the dev budget for the indie game was 5% of the AAA game but the price was 50% then you’ve literally just helped prove my point
The fact is - and I challenge you to prove me wrong here - video games continue to be hands down the best dollar-per-hour investment for entertainment. Even a $60 game that only lasts 20 hrs is still coming in at $3/hr of entertainment, which is very hard to beat. When you look at live service games where people will spend literally thousands of hours after paying anywhere from $60-200 you’re looking at $0.10/hr in some cases.
Now throw in average incomes on the low, medium, and high ends and see if that makes any difference in your criticism of people not wanting to spend so much on a game they might get a hundred or so hours out of.
Hell, throw in the average housing costs and costs of consumables while we’re at it.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the capital structure is fair by any means. I understand all the reasons why people - especially right now - are struggling to justify big purchases.
And I will readily agree that inefficient and improper use of resources is one of the contributing factors to ballooning development budgets
That said, video games are - and I challenge you to disprove this - easily one of the best investments for entertainment. Dollars-per-hour of fun on a 20hr, $60 game is $3. For a live service game where people spend hundreds of thousands of hours playing it can get below $0.10 per hour.
EDIT: I also agree that demos need to make a comeback because I’m sick of wasting money. Though people also need to read some reviews before they buy occasionally :/
You realize that costing more does satiate the greed a little bit, right?
Like, yeah, we all know that line-goes-up capitalism isn’t sustainable, but there are still other reasons call of duty has loot boxes and battle passes now.
I never said anything about the quality of the games. I’m speaking specifically to the monetization bullshit.
As I said elsewhere: budget bloat happens in a lot of places. Greedy executive and publishers is one place. Overambitious design goals that get scrapped is another. There’s also bad tools workflows, mismanagement, and any number of other contributing factors.
But even indie devs are getting screwed on pricing and making far less than they deserve to be in many cases.
If people keep buying CoD and Assassins Creed, devs will keep making them. And if they can’t increase retail price to cover the budget they will find other ways to do it.
We’re still talking about ~3 mil to ~150 mil. If the software dev costs for Mario 64 were closer to ~1.5 mil, what does that have to do with the argument being made?
Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.
Does “older games” only mean the initial public release? So world of Warcraft, Dota 2, Minecraft… all those games that are constantly updated etc. too?
Because that would be a really useless statistic. Many games are not a one time release and done thing anymore. They evolve over time. The games I listed have large player bases.
Exactly what I was thinking. While it’s a great headline the article is nonsense. What about early access? Did those players play any new games? How much time was spent afk? Were those old games new purchases? This is a cherry picked statistic and almost certainly doesn’t paint a clear picture or tell any story except “live service games work”
In general, I’d agree that games are getting better, if for no other reason that there are so many made these days that eventually you’ll find something great.
If nothing else, the total volume of great games that are available to play keeps increasing because of massive improvements in backwards compatibility through steam and other online game distributors.
Are they getting worse overall or are we just comparing all of the current AAA games to the best AAA of the past few decades? Or comparing the current versions of series to the high points, which might just be the first game in the series?
We definitely have a number of high quality AAA games that come out each year. Most prior years had a few high quality AAA games and a lot of mediocre or terrible ones too. It’s kind of like music where the average quality over time is actually pretty consistent, but in any given year there are a lot of turds and there are certain trends that are common to those turds.
90% of every entertainment medium tends to be terrible, but when we look back we mostly remember the 10% that were good and only a few of the absolute worst to laugh at.
In the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s AAA games were becoming increasingly hollowed out husks, with dumbed down paint-by-numbers gameplay and tons of QTEs. And its not like their narratives or art direction were any good either (it being the blurry brown piss filter era). In the same time period we saw the rise of predatory practices like day one DLCs and preorder bonuses.
In more recent times I think we’ve actually seen a reversal of the gameplay hollowing out trend, and an improvement in art direction. However with the rise of lootboxes, trading, and gatcha, monetization schemes are more predatory than they’ve ever been (though these are mostly concentrated in multiplayer games). Its also really common now for games to release in an completely broken and unplayable state.
I feel like a huge number of franchises were started back in the day, but everything now is just sequels and remasters of old games.
How many of the current biggest AAA titles got their start in the 2005-2015 era vs the number of new franchises in 2015-2025?
Creativity seems to be mostly dead and games all have to be mega hits or they’re considered a failure. There’s also a distinct lack of AA games (the successful of which often later became AAA titles).
I’m all for competition and against forced DRM. But the PC gaming service ʀᴇᴅᴀᴄᴛᴇᴅ that you’re referring to offers genuinely good services on top of just accessing games - social platform, (voice) chat, remote play (together), streaming video to friends, communities, easy access to mods, linux support, makes multiplayer easy, etc…
So are most services and then at some point do some type of rug pull with BS EULA changes, etc. that change the functionality of what you’re using. This is prevailant in everything now a days. I’d say with Steam the writing is on the walls. They have so much power in the PC gaming market (like with the examples you gave) it’s only a matter of time.
I do see how useful and user friendly those services you mentioned are
GOG has no DRM. Once purchased you can download the files and own it. You could even write your games to CDs if you wanted and play like the old days.
Edit. I was setting up a new laptop for my Dad. I remembered we used to play an old fighter jet game when I was young. I looked it up and found out it was Falcon 3. I then found GoG sells it. So I purchased it on my account and loaded it onto his computer with no reference to GoG, no clients, etc. It was a surprise for him when he got his new computer.
I own a lot of games on GoG, but I fail to see the practical difference. If GoG were to go under, there’s not going to be any free service hosting all your data and the games for download. It all disappears, just like if Steam were to go under.
The difference is that if you have your files you still can play the games if GoG goes under, while steam games will be unplayable because they need to communicate to steam (or have steam offline on your PC). I heard that steam drm is easy to remove but I don’t have much knowledge in that regard
If steam goes under, a significant portion of your steam games won’t launch anymore, period. If GOG goes under, you can still use 100% of their installers, provided you still have them backed up. No, they are not going to be able to do that step for you. Did the store you bought physical games from put your discs in storage for you, so they wouldn’t clog up your basement? Did they give you a new copy if you lost or threw out your disc and then changed your mind?
The vast majority of digital purchases are licenses, this isn’t something new or unique to Steam. Digital purchases where you actually own the product are more the exception than the rule.
So what do you suggest? Gog is not a contender for me unless they add equivalent regional pricing (in my region), payment options, Linux support (proton), mod workshop, easy multiplayer connectivity, community pages like guides, friend list with messaging and voice chat, etc. Would love to get things on gog but the only thing it has going is DRM free and a ton more negatives. If steam were to rug pull or whatever then I would just go back to the seas.
That’s unfortunate to hear. I doubt anything will compete with Steam with all the things you want. People need to choose to put value where it really matters and have some inconveniences. Pirating certainly won’t get you what you want. Supporting DRM free services (and the games devs) will do more good. You could download your GoG games through the Heroic launcher and it’ll use wine proton (or whatever it’s called). Also Nexus mods has a new mod manager that’ll work on Linux but it’s only in alpha stage currently.
I don’t mind the lack of launcher too much as I already use heroic and have a couple of free gog and epic games there. The biggest blocker for me rn is the payment options and not so great regional pricing compared to steam. It seems to have improved but still not enough so maybe they it will get better in a couple years.
Edit: One more thing. It’s not that I don’t want to support gog but I actually want to support steam for what they did for Linux and still be relatively consumer friendly. I wouldn’t even be using Linux right now if it wasn’t for proton.
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