I don’t even wanna know how much money they made or make with shark cards. Because of the dumbasses who buy that, they know exactly what people are willing to spend.
What a bold-faced clearly obvious motherfucking lie.
Rockstar has released only 2 full games in the past 13 years because everything they’ve done since then has been funded by microtransactions. The price of entry is negligible to them when whales pay for multiple copies of the game every fuckin month.
if rockstar really wanted to win over all gamers, even the ones not planning to play gta, they announce base gta 6 at 50. and then have the 'early/access-10 min early-uber shark complete edition with a unique purple skin at 100 or whatever the fuck they think the whole things worth.
I mean. Yeah. When Goldeneye came out for the N64 it was like $90 and that was in nintiesbux. We got real used to standardized pricing when discs came around but it’s true that you can’t have it both ways. Now, there’s a reasonable argument to be had over whether Mario Kart World and GTA6 are both gonna be worth >$80. I bought Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey for whatever they retailed for. Was that $70? I can’t remember. But I had more fun and put more hours that year into Hollow Knight, which cost me $15 and kept dumping free DLC for like a year or so afterward. The price was great. The DLC was free. But it also didn’t cost like $2bln or whatever dumbass cost they’re saying GTA6 cost to make.
I didn’t ask them to make it that stupid big and expensive. But some fans did. They’re in that Smash Bros situation where they aren’t allowed not to top the previous entry in terms of scope. So it is what it is.
Should all games be $80-90? Of course not. Should games that cost a billion or more to develop and promise hundreds or thousands of hours of gameplay cost $80-90? I think it’s embarrassing and immature to suggest otherwise. Even if you just go back to 2006 and the $60 standard, and adjust that for inflation, you end up at $95. So this isn’t really an argument any serious person should be having when we talk about whether the most expensive game ever made should cost functionally less than its Xbox 360 forerunner.
Nowadays games are very repetitive and grindy. That’s very unfortunate as it kills the game. Very few of them have engaging side quests that don’t feel like generic AI generated crap. So longer gameplay doesn’t automatically equate to better quality games.
It’s working out good for me personally. Between that trend and having gamepass. I don’t have much time to game any more, so can barely get past a tutorial before real life steps in. By that point I feel like I get it though so it’s OK.
I absolutely love kingdom come deliverance 2. Usually in games like that i just mainline the game and even then i usually don’t finish them. I did everything in this game before i even touched the main quest. The game is just very fun to play.
I have the first part, but I am not exactly sold on it. I really like the idea, the historical precision, etc., but the gameplay, especially the fight mechanics are a bit putting me off to a point that I have never completed it. Is the second part better in that regard?
I’m struggling with this too, about 1/3 of the way through the main quest. They tutorialize you on feints and defensive mechanics, but you can’t really punish aggression like you can in a fighting game, and the NPC never falls for my feints, basically ever. Getting through a melee fight feels like luck. The last one I got through was because I managed to impale him with three arrows before the sword fight actually started.
I think I realised what my big problem with $90 games is for Nintendo and it’s this, when I was a kid I used to save up money and buy game boy games. It was an important thing my parents made me do because it meant that I learnt you don’t just get given things for free (gifts are of course fine but at some point you need to learn about working to get money for things you want).
There’s no way he’s going to be able to get $90 in a reasonable time frame. What’s he going to do, cut lawns for 2 years in a row?
Dear internet person, this whole discussion is being triggered because Nintendo, of all people, decided $100 was an acceptable price for a video game. They are the asshats who opened the flood gates for the corporate zombies to waltz in.
Unfortunately this will continue to happen with or without Nintendo being first to do it. They happened to be this time, and it’s BS. But now more than ever people need to vote with their wallets.
Look. I think all AAA companies should do $120 base price for all games. Piracy would have such a boom. Better platforms. many more seeders and good reviews and more freaks hell bent on cracking DRM.
He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.
They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they’ll get £0. I’ll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I’m sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.
Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren’t, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they’re not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that’s make or break for the studio.
Back of the napkin math on a number of them says that a number of them probably took a bath on what was put into them. I get the cynicism, and in many cases you’re right, but it’s been a bad time for video games lately. An industry-wide number of how many billions of dollars video games make is almost entirely coming from only a handful of games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Games like Star Wars Outlaws and Forspoken probably did lose a ton of money. Games like Concord, Avengers, and Suicide Squad lost so much money that it was impossible to not notice it, and they were each to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a lot of games out there, and the dollars tend to flow to very few of them, relatively speaking. But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
This is the solution moving forward and is probably what most studios are doing right now (see: publishers shelving low-profit studios, massive layoffs, etc.), but the issue is that the games launching right now with $70-100 price tags have been in development for years. Their budgets were written under contract during the boom a few years ago, they can’t just “unspend” that money, but at the same time, they’re probably seeing that gamers are being a lot tighter with their wallets these days.
I’m obviously never one to praise higher prices for the same thing, but I at least get why major releases are feeling justified to charge a higher door fee for the base game than to gamble on the freemium market (See: Concord).
That boom also just led to a market with way more games in it every year. With more supply and less demand, you can’t spend as much making the game and expect to be a success unless you’ve got a sure thing. So the higher prices will only be afforded by the games that would have been a success charging less than $70.
It’s true, there are outliers like that. But if you’re looking at shutdown studios or massive layoffs at random, it’s going to be because the game they made lost money. In Hi-Fi Rush’s case, to the best anyone can tell, it’s because Satya Nadella changed the direction of Microsoft at a time when Tango Gameworks was starting a new project, which means there’s the least sunk costs on a project that was going to be several years away from returning a profit.
A small portion of the Rivals team was laid off for similar reasons to Hi-Fi Rush in that the CEO changed the direction of the company. This would still be an outlier compared to the rest of the industry. Respawn got hit with layoffs because their live service isn’t making anywhere near as much money as it used to, and live services need to keep making tons of money to justify new content for them; yes, this is wholly unsustainable. A live service team getting laid off has nothing to do with whether or not it was a hit and everything to do with whether or not it’s still a hit.
I’m disagreeing with the idea that Hi-Fi Rush and the one branch of the Marvel Rivals team being let go are a regular occurrence. In general, teams are being let go because their games aren’t making money. Their games aren’t making money because there are too many games out there that are also spending too much money on their production, and they’re being subsidized by a consumer base that’s stretched too thin to make it all work for everyone that was in the industry as little as 3 years ago.
So, their solution is to charge $90 (lets not kid ourselves, the premium, deluxe, anticipated access, special edition is going to be over $120), so even less people buy it?
LMAO, Rockstar made 9 billion dollars off GTAV micro-transactions. Fuck that noise, ain’t no one crying for billionaires. They could finance and market more than 40 different $200 million games, then give them away for free, and still break even! This is pure greed.
Heard the same crap when they moved from 60 to 70 just a few years back.
Heard how video game development is too expensive while publishers posted record profits.
Heard all about how the same 50 dollar game "back in the day"would cost hundreds now, disregarding how gaming was so much more niche back then too.
Heard the same crap about how these “full price games” would lessen the need for egregious microtransaction
This will again, do nothing to lessen any of that, just push more record profits as gamers won’t be able to resist rewarding the gaming industry for their bad behavior.
They’ll charge whatever they think people will pay, and I’m pretty confident that many millions of people will fork over the $80 - $90 at launch. Prices come down when people stop buying.
Eh, this game was never in the cards for me anyway. I decided years ago to never give Rockstar another dime when they didn't release any single player DLC for GTA5. Fuck that noise.
Wut? We’re mad now about not getting DLC? GTA V was a great game that’s still a blast today. I spent many evenings in front of my PS3 playing the single player for years, never touched GTA: O once and never felt the need to and still believe I got my $60 back in 2013 out of it.
Similar story with RDR 2. Unless GTA 6 is a huge step down from both those games in single-player playability (I’ll wait for reviews obv), I’m not going to lose much sleep over spending $20 more than I spent 13 years ago for the previous game.
If I’m remembering correctly, they had announced single player DLC bit instead just chose to develop more multiplayer stuff since that’s where the big bucks are. I’m busy and don’t have a source right now, but can attempt to find this later and edit as necessary.
GTA V was originally planned to have a number of single-player DLC campaigns akin to the ‘Lost and the Damned’ and ‘Ballad of Gay Tony’ for GTA IV.
This is what people - including me - are bitter about; the immense financial success of GTA:O (namely Shark cards) diverted all resources away from additional single-player content.
I wouldn’t have minded paying for an additional perspective campaign (like GTA IV) or an additional post-campaign chapter heist. GTA V was a complete experience at launch, so additional DLC content would have been welcomed by the community - DLC only becomes problematic when it is clearly part of the core experience, but arbitrarily removed in order to charge more.
Unfortunately, due to having to prioritise shareholder returns - investing resources into anything beyond the most immediately profitable route (ie. online) leaves the board and C-suite open to litigation, because as we should have all learned by now from this series, Capitalism will ultimately ruin everything in search for more and more profits.
The kinda prices a Mario Kart, Pokemon, or GTA can maybe ask for. Try that on a Star Wars Outlaws and the sales nosedive, I reckon.
I think the industry is gonna try to normalize these prices and crash pretty hard, cause they’ll budget their productions thinking they can sell for 90 bucks but forget they‘re neither GTA nor Mario Kart.
Then again, Dynasty Warriors Origins is 79 on Steam, I wonder how that performed for KOEI.
ROFL the more games go $80 to 90 dollars for a base game version, the more I wait for sales. 70 dollars was bad enough in my opinion, but this greed fueled jump is going to put off more potential buyers than it will bring in. It’s my genuine hope that this blows up in their face and will force them to price games reasonably again. Perhaps if the money they made in sales wasn’t mostly funneled into their overpaid CEOs and shareholders, perhaps they’d have more money to cover development costs and keep game prices stable. Sounds like a personal problem to me.
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