When I first started working it was still back in the days where you were given cash in an envelope. After we were paid we always used to go out to a pub together for a few rounds, I rarely used to get through all of the change I’d been given, I never got into the paper money.
You used to be able to get a pint for silvers, these days you need to give them folding money for a bag of peanuts.
But they production cost has gone way down with digital releases, no more shipping and inventory in many cases. Can reach way wider audiences with just internet. Plus all the kids that grew up gaming in the 90s now have money.
They made $2 billion in profits in 2023 in their gaming division. Sony can suck my tiny little dick dick, and I’ll even dip my nuts in soy sauce just so they can get a taste of home while they’re at it.
What do you mean? Our generous corporate overlords have kept the price steady for us at 60. We’re lucky they haven’t done scumbag things like a Deluxe edition for 80, a complete edition for 100, a ln ultimate edition for 120, an ultimate collector’s edition for 200, season passes for an extra 40, 10 different “micro” dlcs for 10 each, or cosmetic packs for 7 each. They’ve also definitely not cut content from the base game either!
Nope, not going to argue against obviously dumb points from executives. Do it. Raise your prices yearly. Fuck it, you think prices need to increase? Increase them.
It takes me five clicks to close Steam, open Firefox, open my favorite piracy site and download your game. Raise the fucking price, test how much I value my money versus five clicks.
Well if they’re gonna charge those prices, they’re probably gonna opt for Denuvo and then we can’t pirate it. But if enough of them do it, then we might see a concerted effort into breaking denuvo
You can price your game however you want. But it doesn’t mean I need to buy it. I still have a choice.
Not sure about the future where we will work for corporations for free and they will pay us with products we don’t want, because we’re heading this road pretty fast.
I’m pretty sure the few overpaid execs that are “fuck you” rich are still there, and they’re probably richer than ever. However now they probably consider themselves too important to park with normal people. It’s all about private jets and helicopters.
Tells a lot about this guy and his ilk that he thinks you measure a healthy company to how many assholes actively flaunt their money with shallow luxury shit.
One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.
There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.
New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.
As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.
Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.
Yeah it’s hilarious to me they wanna charge more and don’t expect to sell less. Ppl would go from being iffy about indie games to checking them out more if 4 at base price cost what a AAA one does
Video game budgets are still lower than film budgets and ticket prices for movies haven’t steadily climbed, arent anywhere near $60 a pop, nor have there been all these freaks coming out of the woodworks to say movie tickets should cost more.
That’s the thing, a lot of investors almost don’t like the idea that video games are low budget. They want to be able to double their funding and quadruple their success, like with a lot of growth properties.
At the time, 12 years ago, maybe that was the most expensive video game ever made. Like Avatar, it too has been eclipsed by so many others. A Call of Duty game now costs about $700M to make. A Sony blockbuster costs $200M-$300M; Concord may have been $400M.
I don’t know how universal it is, but movie tickets here have at least tripled since I was a kid, 20 odd years ago.
Meanwhile, me and 4 friends pooled our pocket money together to buy a video game that we could barely afford. Brand new video games are the same price now.
I’m not saying “they should increase their price”, but it is wild how somehow they haven’t in decades
they haven’t increased because the cost of production has drastically dropped. cartridges were expensive as hell to make; the hardware was like half to cost of the game. disks were cheaper but you still had all the extras like bespoke formats, copy protection and manuals. with digital distribution, the production cost is zero. even when you buy a physical release, you get an empty box with an off-the-shelf bluray.
Must be nice living somewhere where cinema prices did not climb. I can assure you its been different where I live.
You got to look at it relatively, a movie never cost even close to $60, so why would it end up there. It cost something like less than $10 but now the average is around $16. Games were maybe $60 and now could be $80, so it is actually a very comparable increase.
Edit: to be fully clear, I don’t think there should be a comparable increase between those two things. Buying a video game and going to watch a movie are two very different things to do. Just pointing out that movie tickets did in fact get more expensive. There’s also the “creative accounting” often being done in the film industry, I don’t think that’s a thing in the gaming industry. So many differences.
I mean, inflation exists. That said, they just use dlc and other microtransactions to recoup costs (plus in some ways production is cheaper, just not overall).
I like to remind people that they’re taking advantage of a thing called consumer surplus. In short, any given person will spend X amount of dollars for a product, be it $60, $30 half off, or $120 collectors edition, etc. Hell, “free” gets the most heads, hence how mobile market works.
Flat $60 (or the shift to $80) will inevitably cut off anyone unwilling to pay that price, which at a certain point is bad for business and why you get sales. Plus, most sales are digital now, so it’s not like there’s a per unit overhead. Keeping a dynamic pricing structure is simply better in spite of inflation, which obviously this former boss apparently doesn’t get.
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