And he’s right. Switch 2 and its $80 games will not only sell like hot cakes, it will set the standard for AAA publishers going forward. I fully expect to see $100 base games as standard before the end of the next generational cycle, and they’ll still have microtransactions and endless special editions.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure about it at first and it was kind of an impulse buy, but I was hooked after my first couple of runs. Great game for the Steam Deck too.
Sure. Unless you have a gaming friend group that gets interested in some new multiplayer game. Then you either buy it so you can play with them, or you don’t play with them. If this continues for multiple games, you will slowly grow distant from your friend group.
That ought to be fine… it’s like saying your friends aren’t really your friends unless you play [x y or z]… In which case, I’m moving on to play what I enjoy.
Yup. Gamers, PC, console, mobile, all want their circus to escape reality, regardless of the cost short or long term.
I mean I keep hoping that gamers would have an epiphany and push back on these anti-consumer practices but I’ve seen nothing in the past twenty years, only desperate games defending being gouged.
Haven’t had the urge to buy a Nintendo game since the GameCube. Sure, the Wii was fun at parties back in the day but that’s about it. I’ve tried the new Mario and Zelda games but they always look and feel like low effort garbage meant to snare the same crowd as “Disney adults”.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I honestly can’t fathom calling Mario or Zelda games low effort on the developers part. It seems like a lot of time and care go into them, for the most part.
For everyone chiming in with piracy (which I support): Layden is more calling Nintendo fans “junkies” than advocating for 80$ prices. His message (even in the face of Ryan’s LSG push) has always been “first party exclusivity sells consoles”.
Won’t they, though? Even disregarding the option of piracy, while new games will be $70 or $80 or whatever at launch, they go down eventually and Steam pricing has always been better than console.
Because being able to play your existing switch games with better performance is a big part of their sales pitch for this, but people were already starting to do that with the Steam Deck. At that point the comparison for the devices would look like:
Steam Deck: Cheaper, more ergonomic, can play more games, games cost less, games aren’t locked to the console, no charge for better performance if you upgrade to new hardware, can play any game from consoles up to some ps3 through emulation
Nintendo: Better battery life, 120Hz HDR screen, has a new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong game
In every other way it would lose the comparison.
With the emulator crackdown, people don’t perceive it that way, because they don’t think of emulation as an option for the switch. (I mean, some do, but even Retro Games Corps isn’t talking about that possibility anymore because of the strikes against his YouTube channel; they’ve greatly reduced the visibility of that as an option.)
For my part, I’m leaning towards sticking Moonlight on my existing Switch and just streaming from my desktop. It’s not elegant, but you can’t beat the price.
That also! My sense is that for the switch it’s basically only limited by emulator compatibility, but for ps3 and xbox one it’s partially limited by the available cpu and gpu power. I may be mistaken about that though, I don’t own a Deck and haven’t tested this stuff myself.
It’s been a couple years since I tried PS3 and Xbox 360 emulation, but when I did it on PC was the compatibility of the emulator rather than processing power that caused most game to not be playable. It ran Katamari Forever really well, so I’m hoping I can get it running on the Steam Deck, too!
J2ME are old dumb non-touchscreen phones. My last one was Sony Ericsson j108i. And just now reading the Wikipedia entry, it was actually the last non-smartphone phone by Sony Ericsson! Nice.
Damn, the nostalgia is real. And the design still looks much better than smartphones which look pretty much all the same. Back then, phones had personality.
The Sony Ericsson phones in particular had very advanced J2ME support that I didn’t see that much difference between that and my first smartphone (Nokia C5-03). Not that there weren’t differences, the smartphone was definitely more advanced, but it wasn’t that huge of a leap.
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.
Needlessly absolute take. Yes, there’s going to be parents, who’d rather pay extra than look into what other games they could give their kid, as well as loyal Mario fans, who will pay pretty much any price. But there’s obviously also players who do weigh up their options based on price, and who will make different decisions when they have to decide between two titles, when one of them is cheaper. Especially with the additional invest for a new console and the more dire economic situation, I could see many players not buying into the Switch 2 at all.
If I have to pay $80 for Kirby Air Ride 2, I will pay $80 for Kirby Air Ride 2. I have waited 22 years for this game, there's never been anything else like it.
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