Unfortunately considering how many of these gamers are willing to pay extra $30€ just to get 1 week earlier access to a game, I'm afraid you are wrong in this regard and we're going to see prices go up even more. Piracy is also dying, either because of groups disbanding or getting sued, or because of DRM getting better and more widespread, and once that is gone it's going to let publishers jack the price even higher up.
I'm pretty much resigned to just play indie and AA games at this point, there's no way I'm paying 60 or more for these broken, bloated and often overpriced products. There are few exceptions but even they will be driven to higher prices eventually.
I pretty much exclusively buy AA at this point, with the rare AAA nintendo 1st party title that I'm happy to pay $60 for. Most AAA games though just aren't worth it. Some of those games coming out you couldn't pay me to play.
There are so many tbh, really depends on what type of games you're interested in. I've really enjoyed remnant 1 and 2, owlcat pathfinder games, VRising, Riftbreaker, Timberborn, Against the Storm for example. All made by good dedicated studios that deserve your money more than EA, bioware, actiblizz or other corpos like that. Of the older titles, FTL, Into the Breach, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Project Zomboid etc are classics - polished games made with love that put pretty much every AAA title to shame in comparison.
Honestly, he’s right. Game prices are the same 60-70 dollars they’ve been for 30 years, but nothing else has stayed the same price that long. With inflation, a game should be around 200 dollars.
Super Mario Bros 3 came out in the last half of 1988 and costed $50 dollars, or around 127 dollars. It also costed about $800,000 to develop, which is about $2 million today.
Nowadays, it costs around $80 million (about 40x) on average to make a AAA title that costs $60 (about half). This is why all these games have cash shops and battle passes and paid dlc and whatnot: they need to make up that extra cost somewhere.
I can understand woth this information companies wanting to charge more, but I feel like standards need to be higher and refunds guaranteed. They can't ask us to spend 100's of dollars on half-complete, buggy messes of games AND also want to charge for DLC and have micro-transactions.
And don't forget it's just a rental of the game, at any time they could shut off the game or license servers because they don't want to sell or keep that game anymore.
While i agree that prices have been stagnant, its also a game of companies wanting to reduce risk. You have unicorn examples like Baldurs Gate 3 which took its time to develop a game, and has stated they dont plan on making paid expansion content, meaning where they at they see the game as profitable, despite spending 5 years in development for it.
Part of the reason why some games have balooned cost is because of improper spending of the money. Many spend a lot of money on marketing which tends to have an overly inflated cost on its own, due to the fact that people have a preference to play whats familliar, however its been shown that also actually making a good game with little marketing also works, and a lot of dev studios havent gotten to that point yet.
Super Mario Bros also only sold about 2.5 million units in the first several month after release. Baldur's Gate, for example, sold almost 6 million in 2 weeks. The NES sold 2.5 million units in its first year. The Switch sold 13 million. Even the worst selling modern console, the Xbox Series X sold 8 million in the first year. While individual game prices have not risen, the total number of sales has dramatically increased. So pardon me if I don't think the cost of games not rising has been a problem for publishers and developers of AAA titles. Their real problem has been putting out good content that enough gamers want.
Distribution is getting easier and cheaper, the available talented workforce is larger than ever, tools are getting better and faster with every day and despite "no large increase in costs", the gaming industry has grown to be one of the largest and most profitable industries in the entire world and everyone wants a piece of that cake.
$60 is fine and anything above that is pure greed.
I buy games that release for $40 and $50. They don't have dlc. They don't have microtransactions. They don't have cash shops. They don't have battle passes. I just pay my $40/$50, get my physical copy, often with a bundled goodie like cards or keychains, and play and enjoy my 40hr game.
It's absolutely possible because the companies that release these titles are pumping out several per year. You just.... have to stop spec racing and obsessing over 200hr playtimes and top of the line graphics and actually focus on making a decent, mid-sized game, with realistic expectations.
playstation started declining with ps3 which released in 2006. PS4 released in 2013, a decade ago. PS4 wasn't worth buying. That's a decade of garbage from sony.
Since they bought bandcamp payments have been fucked. Ever since every time someone buys an album it takes 2 or 3 days to reach me. Which is terrible on band camp friday, where all funds go to the artist. Because of the delay instead of getting the entire sale, I get the regular amount. Logins have been breaking, the app has been unstable, and a bunch of smaller issues. They fucked it up.
The giant BR is likely Fortnite, the Battle Royale part that is the game most people know wasn't supposed to be the big deal, what is now Save The World was supposed to be the game and BR was just going to be tacked on.
Their reboot of Unreal Tournament failed. And so did their moba named Paragon. Arguably, their Fortnite Save the World also failed. Gears of War Judgement had poor sales for a Gears game though that may have been mostly developed by People Can Fly.
Generally if we ignore Fortnite and Infinite Blade(a mobile game), their last successful game was Gears 3, from 12 years ago. They basically only have Fortnite, Unreal Engine and the Epic store.
They cancelled a bunch of games like Paragon and Unreal tournament to feed the Fortnite machine, abandoned the main Fortnite mode they had already sold and then started funneling money at the epic store.
The epic store at this point has been such a huge loss, exclusivity deals alone are worth millions and not even those managed to get them a user base.
A company with Fortnite’s and Unreal’s income should not be struggling to make a profit.
I'd venture a wild guess that the revenue split business model behind Unreal Engine, and the strategy around spending tons of money to bring people over to the Epic Games Store, are not sustainable. They probably have been generally subsidized by the huge amount of cash that Fortnite has brought in.
Maybe the Fortnite well has dried up? 2023 has been a strong year for news game releases, and it's possible that Fortnite has lost some of players' attention?
Hard to say, but it's looking like Unity are not the only ones struggling to keep their business afloat.
I only have played Fortnite because my nephew was big into it for a long time, now that he and his friends are in high school they have quit playing, I don't know if that's a big trend, but he tells me it is just not cool to play anymore.
They keep giving away free games each week (they have to pay to the publishers of the games to give away games) yet nobody spend money in the store (I think the average was each user spend like $10 or $15 per year)
They also keep buying exclusives, a thing that cost money...
And we cannot forget all the studios and company they have bought, the purchase cost money and their maintenance too
Well, I think gaming standards are too low, Harushiro Tsujimoto.
Here's the deal, we keep the game costs where they are, but you need to stop pulling unrealistic ideals to match up to. And you need to stop shitting out bad games just to keep the trademarks alive and other copyrights. Give us GOOD Megaman games, not whatever Megaman Dive is.
We need to go back to the model of where making good games was a key priority. Why have you forgotten this?
Things like this aren’t always discrimination. The article said one woman believes that men have better reflexes than women. I’m not sure if that’s true but if it isn’t there’s not really any physical differences between men and women that should affect their ability in eSports.
I feel like this disparity is a cultural thing where women generally don’t play video games as much or as early in life.
This happened in league of legends many years ago. There was some all girl team, even though there was nothing about league of legends that required men only teams, that many people were championing as a great thing about women being given equal ground. I’m sure they were better than me and a lot of the millions of people that play league of legends but the second they got to the “big leagues” they honestly got wiped the floor with.
I feel like this disparity is a cultural thing where women generally don’t play video games as much or as early in life.
And that the stats are off. Probably they count mobile games as "gaming". Candycrush isn't gaming. And honestly, ESports is a euphemism. It isn't sports.
What qualifies an activity to be classified as sport? Chess is a sport, so physical activity is not a requirement
Contemporary chess is an organized sport with structured international and national leagues, tournaments, and congresses. Thousands of chess tournaments, matches, and festivals are held around the world every year catering to players of all levels.
In that I'm consistent: chess isn't a sport either. Sure, you feel wrecked after hours of concentration, but if that's the only criteria, then office jobs would be sport. If it has to be a game, then office politics could be treated as a game with rules and it would still be a sport.
So no, it has to have physical activity and the physical activity has to be significant enough to tire out muscles. Lifting a beer for a few minutes would be more of a sport than esports, chess or anything else majorly mental. The brain isn't a muscle.
fact: a piece of information presented as having objective reality
Chess has tournament, leagues, championships, federation and all that like other sports and is accepted by the society (except for you, it seems) as an sport, so the objective reality is chess is a sport. That's the reality you live in, like it or not.
Looks like they just were spending too much and needed to clean up. On the positive side, they're offering all affected employees 6 months of severance + healthcare. That is really generous of them.
I passed on this game a because it looked like a generic city builder. But having finally played it it had some surprising mechanics.
building up. Your space is fairly limited and you’ll want the good land for growing food. So you need to build up. Buildings ontop of buildings and you’ll need to account for efficient pathing and scaffolding. I thought this was a really cool mechanic.
power, the power mechanic is also pretty interesting. Everything that needs power is either attached to a powered building or connected via a big spinning log. Power sources are water wheels and windmills neither of wich is consistent so you also need gravity batteries. These are cool because the higher up you make them the better they are which encourages you to use mountains and scaffolds to make huge structures.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this game continues to grow
It's definitely a recommendation from me for all basebuilder/colony management enjoyers out there, maybe its not as deep or complex with its mechanics as I'd prefer at times but it's a very unique, charming game that only keeps getting better with updates like these. Badwater seems like it could really spice up the game and change it drastically in the later phases which is just what I hoped for!
Thing is... video games don't really "need" actors. At least not in the same level as they need writers.
Sure, some games might want to add realistic expressions and maybe even voice acting, but it's not something really required for most forms of video game entertainment. Even story-heavy games do perfectly fine with just good writing. In fact, for RPG universes meant to be extensible / moddable, it makes a lot more sense to not be restricted by how many lines of dialogue can the game afford to voice. Morrowind has a lot more dialog options than Oblivion and extensibility / flexibility in how the users interact with NPCs, despite Oblivion having superior AI and a lot more budget.
In fact, a lot of the videogames that do make use of voice acting, only do so for one (or at most, a few) languages... meaning that there's always some subset of players that don't really understand anything the voices say and still enjoy the game. They might as well be speaking autogenerated gibberish, like Animal Crossing characters do.
Add to that how nowadays 3D animators have a good dataset of information to tap into for creating convincing expressions, plus how AI can be very good at generating decent voice lines... and it gets even harder for a walkout like this to have any success. At least when it comes to the video game market.
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