He’s 100% right. Gamers buy terrible overpriced content all the time. Basically all of my friends that play WoW bought a 90$ a mount because it has an auction house on it. That’s more than the actual game costs.
Let’s say Switch 2 emulation doesn’t get good for a few years (which is totally possible, depending on how well Nintendo locked it up). He’s saying that if it’s the only way to play NEW Mario games, people will buy it at $80. He’s right, millions will, but there are some like me who are huge Mario fans who will refuse to support such naked greed. Enough to matter to them? Probably not.
But I hope Switch 2 emulation does get to a playable state sooner rather than later.
I’m not schocked by a game costing around 80$ as that’s already what a new game costs in my country.
I remember buying Final Fantasy 8 almost 30 years ago for above 90$ as a teenager.
I also kind of remember that NES and Super NES games were really expensive.
I’m not saying that I want the price of games to increase though and I think it’s weird that Nintendo is doing this when their games clearly aren’t the most expensive ones to create.
I know I won’t be buying a Switch 2and I think people should vote with their wallets.
Have you seen the average Nintendo game? Unless they’re buying all of their developers solid gold keyboards to work on, I’m not seeing where the price justification comes from.
Game pricing hasn’t changed much, sure. I paid $70 for n64 games in 1996. But volume sure has
FFVIII sold 6 million copies in its first year, a huge commercial success, and has sold 9.6 million lifetime Ever juggernaut games like Mario 64 - 12 million copies. FFVII - 12.6 million Pokemon red blue green combined - 30 million Madden 2007 - 7.7 million (interestingly EA does not release sales figures for modern madden games, probably because sports games seem to make far more money from micro transactions than sales. NBA 2k for example sells around 7m units a year but is one of the highest grossing franchises in gaming)
More recent games:
baldurs gate 3 sold 15 million copies Elden ring 20 million Pokémon sword and shield - 27 million Diablo 3 30 million The Witcher 3 50 million Skyrim 60 million Rdr2 70 million GTA 5 200 million
So when people cry “wahh, videogame prices need to rise because inflation” remember that they are stupid and overlook the very basic fact that 20-30 years ago gaming was a niche activity that got nowhere near the volume it gets today. Any single game selling 50 million copies in the 90s or early 2000s, let alone 200 fucking million, was an insane pipe dream
Your friendly reminder that gaming back in 1998 was still not selling millions of copies as compared to now and revenue has for gaming has been rising significantly since.
Cool, now do the cost of everything else and compare then to now and you might have some idea of why $80 for a video game is a bitter pill to swallow.
Friendly reminder that games from 1998 were just games and didn’t have endless predatory mechanics designed to cripple the game in some way to extract money from you after you bought them too.
He’s basically saying “suck it up, buttercup”. They think people are going to have no choice but pay these prices, with all the crazy shit going on. Maybe the Switch 2 will be successful, but most of my adult video gamer friends have already said they are going to pass. Only the ones that still have small kids are considering it.
He means “there are a ton of children with parents who cannot enforce boundaries and there are a ton of grown people who will make poor financial decisions”. Nintendo will exploit both
Hopefully someone will exploit Nintendo with a paper clip again
Physical media has been dying for years. If you look at the sales statistics between physical and digital, it makes for grim reading if you care about physical media.
75% of game sales in Europe in 2024 were digital. In 2022, 90% of game sales in the UK were digital. It’s a similar story pretty much everywhere. And whilst there’s a lot of noise on the internet about how bad a digital-only future would be, the average consumer doesn’t care.
I realized a while ago that it’s not actually the physical media I care about; it’s the unfettered access. Physical media is just the easiest way to achieve that. I still buy from steam and pay for streaming, but I recognize that those could be taken away at any time. I want to feel like I actually own something. I buy digital music because I get a DRM-free file. I buy from GOG because I get an installer that I can store locally for as long as I want to.
When it comes to movies? I have to buy the disc because (almost?) no one offers a DRM-free video file that I can store locally and play whenever or however I want.
The world has gone too long without game developers returning criticism to fans. Some game devs don’t serve their fans well and deserve a blasting, but that’s generally a minority. Most of the time, gamers in online spaces are the same sort of Karen at the register saying “The customer is always right” every single day, and they‘ve needed to take a step back for a long time.
Corollary: I play an online game that’s full of glitches. I’m upset at the dev about it, but also patient because I know programming is hard, and I’m sure they get frustrated at those bugs too.
the article is mostly reporting on “a Q&A on the InstalBase forums” with “business journalist Christopher Dring”. The headline kind of makes the 80% figure sound like a bad thing, but I think it’s more meant to share info with the public that industry insiders already know about. No producer working at EA is shocked by this figure, but the headline is not for them. This info is still helpful for many groups, like maybe new devs who aren’t yet industry insiders, but need to know what they are getting into before they sign a shitty Game Pass deal with Microsoft.
Great - what am I supposed to do with this? Hope it’s not as shit as the rest of the UE5 games or Cyberpunk? Hope my hardware can run it? Have they learnt nothing from Cyberpunk? Like STFU and maybe show people things when it’s ready?
Nothing. Not every information needs to be actionable by its receivers. Do not get hyped up but know there will be a next installment and wait till they show something.
Yeah - and us consumers don’t need every fucking milestone painted out either. We didn’t back this. Show it to us when it’s time or get the fuck out of my feed. But watch how they’ll go down the cyberpunk route and build hype over 7 years again to deliver a broken piece of shit on launch. Why? Because they made so much money last time doing it.
I do understand the reaction somewhat though… It’s these kinds of news that gets people hyped for a game and leads to the sort of pressure that might make a launch fail as it did with Cyberpunk
Announcing a game is not over-hyping. If you can’t control yourself that a simple announcement that a game is in production makes you have a meltdown, then probably they shouldn’t be browsing the gaming community, where this kind of news is expected
Help me solve my dilemma - I do want to hear about new exciting releases/reviews of upcoming games but I also don’t want news of announced games which are 5+ years away. And especially don’t want to hear about every little morsel of info they throw your way in the 5 year build up only to launch disastrously and then keep us in the news cycle for another 2-3 years where they advertise how they are fixing their game only to turn around and ask for more money to sell you an expansion. How do I just focus on the good ones?
Cyberpunk runs on the RedEngine. This game will be the first for CD Project Red to run Unreal engine.
I agree however that Unreal engine might be a bad choice. We’ll have to see. They change engine because of money as developing an engine is far more expensive than using Unreal Engine.
That makes no sense 🤣 if they had done that then it would mean they would have to develop the game all over again in UE5. UE5 and redENGINE are two different engines and there is no “upgrading” from one engine to the other without making the game all over again in the different engine.
Digital Foundry did an analysis. It’s a mixed bag, some games may look better, some worse. The core problem seems to be the new upscaling technology PSSR from Sony (for haters its pronounced like “pisser”, oh I see in your other comment you are already aware of this lol).
Imagine paying a premium price of 800 Euros and then getting this. Fanboys will defend it no matter what, just like Apple fans defend if they purchase crap.
Every acronym should be run past a bunch of ten year olds. No idea how they thought this was a good idea, but then again, they greenlit Concord at about the same time.
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