It wouldn't be, necessarily. A bunch of games (survival games, in particular) still give you that choice. It's cheap, reliable and doesn't need a ton of people playing your game.
The problem is then you can't do matchmaking, you need a server browser, which is a lot clunkier. And it does get harder to avoid cheating and so on. The experience is also dependent on how close the server is from you, and if it's just some guy's computer the server goes away when they're not playing.
For fighting games specifically, where "room matches" are still a thing in most games, I do see it becoming an option as a separate mode. And man, if you're doing something like Multiversus I do think you should consider having it ready to go as a fallback, because this is a bad look and hurts future games that may want to give this a shot.
Well, that's the problem of GaaS. It used to be games cost however much to make and you were recouping expenses after. These days games cost money to run, on account of all the centralized backend and dedicated server cost to keep everything locked down and enable matchmaking and microtransactions.
The bizarre thing is this zombie state where pieces of the game work, but only if you bought stuff ahead of time. The idea of F2P fighting games makes some sense on the surface, but with the way audiences work in the genre it may not be feasible because... who the hell is going to buy into a fighting game that poofs into the ether the moment someone else gets a Mai Shiranui DLC again?
Looking at you, 2XKO. I played Rising Thunder. I remember.
And the natural conclusion of that is why have the up front charge at all. You do the 2XKO thing or the Multiversus thing and just let people play and charge for the characters. Of course that may mean being online for purchase authentication, right?
I don't like where that goes.
I think SF in particular is pretty sure it can pull a decent chunk of cash up front and not impact sales too much, so that's better for them, since they're monetizing all the casual players, but sitll. It's a dynamic that's in play and I don't like it.
You already spend more than 100 for Street Fighter and always have. The full roster for SF6 is currently 100/110 bucks. Not counting MTX and extra cosmetics.
Sure, you didn't pay it all at once, but that's no different than me buying SF2 and then Super SF2 the following year, each for seventy-ish bucks.
Sorta kinda. We moved to 69.99 for major releases a while ago. Late 2000s in some territories, later in others.
In the US it was 59.99 for the CD era, but it was higher before when cart costs were a massive chunk of the retail price. I bought games that launched at 100 (or its local equivalent) in the 90s, particularly on SNES and N64.
But it's true that prices have been super stable while moving from expensive carts to cheap CDs and then trivially expensive digital releases. Now there's no way to cut costs on distribution (you're already subsidizing storage, it's just down to bandwidth, which is paid by the retailer anyway). So now inflation is catching up, since none of the money is going to making boxes, stamping CDs or shipping games in trucks. Now when inflation hits there's no longer a way to hide the pricing impact, so it goes to sticker price.
And people are so used to that stability that they immediately rage on the Internet, if this thread is anything to go by, so the only answer is to hide more of the cost in MTX and dump the sticker price altogether.
Kinda argued against myself there. The real answer isn't prices will "evenutally" go up, it's that they will go down to zero and traditional gaming will become mobile gaming. That's probably more likely.
For one thing, I'm not American, baseline game prices here took a similar hike during the PS4 era, so I'd be curious to see if or when US game prices adjust and whether that comes with a local price bump. Although looking at recent releases maybe they already did.
For another, it is kind of insane how much lower the baseline price of what used to be called "retail packaged goods" games has gotten, adjusted for inlfation. As I write this, Civ 7 is the best selling full price game on Steam, going for 69,99USD. That's 48-ish USD in 2010 money, the Internet tells me. The previous release to even get close to the best sellers list at that price (and it sold pretty terribly, as far as I can tell, at least on Steam), was Indiana Jones, for the same price. Everything else is much, much, much cheaper, with the list being dominated by games anywhere between free to play and thirty bucks.
That's two conflicting pushes. Games are dirt cheap now. You can't even sell them at the sticker price that was normal in the 2010s anymore, and even if you did, that's 30% less inflation-adjusted money than before. The average game developer salary has gone from high 90K to 115K in 2025 in that period as, again, the Internet tells me.
So basically GTA or no, I don't see how you get anything BUT GTA sequels and Call of Dutys going forward. It's MTX-fests or nothing. It's pretty messed up, IMO. I like splashy, good-looking AAA games and would take them any day over, say, a Marvel Rivals. But spoiler alert, Marvel Rivals is going to make all the money and you'll be lucky if you ever see a Ratchet sequel again, let alone a third party big single player game.
Good call. Vita emulation still sucks, the device proper is very nice and there are some good games stuck in there. Less these days, when a bunch of them got up-ports to PC and whatnot, but still.
For the life of me I don't understand why there's so little interest in Vita preservation. I get that it wasn't as well liked as the PSP, and all the custom features are tricky while also having the hassle of all the PSN integration you get on modern console emus, but... still, you know?
Yeah, that's why Satisfactory is probably a better choice (I mean, it's mostly "what if Factorio didn't look like a 1999 Flash game").
Honestly in 2025 (hey, happy new year!) things are platform-agnostic enough that the biggest thing to do when you switch to PC gaming is go check how all the games you know play when you run them at 200 fps or whatever. But even if you're an action game guy I do think it's work taking a few minutes to decide if you're going to be a sweaty mouse and keyboard guy and it's time to start browsing online stores for mice with ten grams shaved off the mouse wheel or whatever.
Man, for a console gamer coming over this thread has a bunch of pretty terrible recommendations. I can't imagine a better way to send somebody back to console gaming than immediately dumping a bunch of fiddly mods and janky old stuff on them so they can play their OS for a while before having any fun.
I mean, if they're into competitive, hardcore console stuff they probably will want to decide if they want to go down the rabbit hole of competitive PC gaming. Checking out a couple MOBAs or fast mouse and keyboard shooters is probably a good way to start (for Steam ease of use I suppose DOTA2 and CS2 are the obvious choices). That's the fighting game equivalent stuff they're unlikely to have played already. I'd say if they aren't feeling it, it's fine to step away, though.
Depending on how beefy their gaming PC is, it may be fun to go for crazy console-crushing visuals. Path traced games like Indiana Jones or Cyberpunk may be fun to check out even if they've played the console versions, if they have a current-gen expensive GPU in there.
There are a couple of genres that are also cross-over but play best on PC, like survival sims and the like. I'm a PC controller player, but I'll switch to mouse and keyboard for, say, Satisfactory, although that's less action-packed and timing-based.
And of course there's upcoming stuff. VF 5 REVO is coming out in January, and that seems like a good chance to jump into a new thing on a gaming PC instead.
Yeah, well, if I wanted to tell you who I am I'd write a bio, and I have no obligation to educate or reality check people one by one, which doesn't work anyway.
You're right, though, it's dismissive and kinda rude and definitely not worth having the conversation because it won't change any minds. Which is why people don't have the conversation in the first place.
Those pieces don't say at all what you (or the OP, I suppose) are implying. The first one is about working conditions and harassment, the others are about management choices, not at all in-fighting or jealousy among writers. Incidentally, that last one sucks. Go find better games reporting, holy crap, I promise you it exists.
Honestly, it's a neverending source of fascination to see what people who don't work in the industry perceive as the internal logic of these things. I used to think it was a problem of transparency, the industry not doing enough to show things behind the scenes or explain how games are made. But man, that part has improved A LOT. There are lots more resources now to help you wrap your head around it, but the weird fantasy world people imagine is still exactly the same. It's very frustrating.