According to Nintendo my legitimate backed up software is causing them to loose money. At this point even if the legal way is wrong, then why not go full sail.
this would make sense if the game developers were being paid properly to begin with, rather than the leeches that are the c-suite taking more than they should
That is how inflation works… when costs go up prices go up.
Yeah, your computer probably should cost a lot more in “today dollars” but because performance of components gets more efficient over time, you can likely get a better computer for less money.
It’s the same reason you have a computer more powerful than multiple thousands of dollar super computers. The technology has improved enough you don’t have to pay as much.
Do you think prices should just be locked in place for eternity at $60?
You can’t just scale game prices linearly with inflation, sure costs of development have increased, not just because of inflation but also because games are much more complex now. But the gaming market has grown a lot and games are infinitely reproducible so that hugely increases profits.
I don’t know how much we should pay for games, but just comparing it to inflation is useless
We are already are, look at season passes, dlc etc, 90+ is the de facto price of a lot of AAA games. They’ll claim going even higher is to support developers or whatever when laying people off en masse and posting even larger quarterly results, it’s pure avarice.
They also tend to sell more copies vs decades ago, which is partly why the $70cad game was so normal for so long IMO.
There is an argument to be made that Expedition 33 was essentially created by a studio with 30 people (though once you add everyone that worked on it the credits do balloon to over 400) with a rather small budget, and meanwhile companies like Rockstar, Sony and Activision have thousands working for years and spending hundreds of millions creating games like GTA 6, CoD and Concord, so naturally they should be a lot more expensive to buy too.
They just shouldn’t be surprised if people don’t buy all the $500 Waguy steak on offer and are perfectly happy with way cheaper options.
Nobody rightfully complains when Lamborghini sells their luxury car for hundreds of thousands. Gamers have been conditioned for far too long that indie games cost less than 60 and everything else costs 60. This was the fault of the industry to be sure, but it’s clear the barrier is being broken by necessity and expensive-to-make games are going to climb the price ladder and prices for games overall will stratify like many other markets.
Interestingly, that’s all Shuhei is saying here. Pay for the games you think are worth it. Games still provide a significant amount of value for their cost, even at higher price points. This is obviously true as we’ve had a decade of base game $60 and ultimate edition $90-100 with people purchasing ultimate editions and such.
Are you suggesting that AAA games are such premium, high quality products they should only be experienced by a few wealthy individuals who can afford the budget to buy them? Because that is what your analogy suggests.
That is what my analogy suggests and I suppose how you define wealthy matters, but that’s not strictly what I mean. I just mean prices are starting to striate.
AAA game devs are spending more on games every year and then suddenly finding out their market isn’t as wide as they hoped. High upfront cost + low demand sounds like a luxury product then, no? In the before times, they would release for $60 and squeeze hard for money. They can still do that, but now - since the price dam has broken - they can release for $80-100 and get more cash per super fan and then drop price aggressively to catch others who balked at the initial price.
I’ll be clear that the problem is the AAA industry spending too much on games when they don’t need to.
Over 400 seems a bit high to me but the size vs cost argument remains. Those external voice actors, animators, QA testers etc were all paid. Kepler Interactive even gave them money to have known actors for VA (they probably aren’t cheap).
So that’s very probably a several million budget (rumored to be between 5 and 25 mil according to non reliable source, thanks to Kepler and the early Gamepass contract).
Ok that’s not a 500 million budget, rather a 50 mil one (to be very large), but it’s definitely not a 500k budget.
And yet they sell it 45$.
Anyway, it just prove that you can build a Waguy steak alternative for cheaper while keeping the taste and without abusing your workforce.
There’s also the argument whether games really need that high of a budget. It feels like there’s little correlation between the budget of a game, and its success (or quality).
Sony could’ve invested in five or ten more Helldivers 2 scaled games, instead of wasting it all on the Concord flop.
I would be so excited if more games were made in an n64 or ps1 style. Maybe I’m just huffing nostalgia, but I still enjoy some of those classics. Games don’t have to have amazing graphics or be massive to be fun.
He’s not wrong, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a steal for the price it is. “Really great games” do exist and they’re worth their price tag, the problem is the number of AAA games of that caliber are like 1 in 30. We’re lucky to get one in any given year. Meanwhile, there are consistently high quality indie games coming out for less than $40.
“as long as people spend less money on games overall things will be fine!” Easy to say when you’re retired from the industry. I don’t think anyone in the industry would appreciate the implications of that…
If the customers still buy it in the end, the publisher was right. We will see over time. Maybe there will be a drop in sales but then GTA6 comes along and no one can resist, opening the path for other games.
Someone on lemmy recently put this into perspective for me. Even like 1% of the population of the USA is 3 million people. If you increase the cost of a product and don’t care about long-term sales, the immediate gain in profit can outweigh the loss of total customers down the line.
I still think cutting off customers and burning good will isn’t a good business model, but I’m not stupid wealthy, so what do I know.
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