Other countries got their price increase months ago. Ours was probably delayed so that they could tell how bad the damages of our idiot president would be.
Good games fail to make their money back all the time. It’s not enough to just make a good game. In the case of Apex Legends, a game that needs to keep you playing long term at the expense of others, it needed to not only be good but also be earlier to market than its competitors, which is impossible to plan for. Its success involves a lot of luck, too, and using it as an example is survivorship bias.
That’s plenty of variety to not end up seeing the same matchups over and over again, as long as there are no runaway top tiers to kill the variety. Really excited about this one still.
In a roundabout way, I guess, due to where they land on the supply-demand curve, but I’m not sure why we’re talking about Super Mario World. Game prices weren’t really standardized in any sort of way until they moved to discs, where the “floor” price for any given game was minuscule, and as we moved to digital distribution in the next few decades, this is the period where prices remained fairly stable, as they rose far slower than inflation.
Oh, I love skill-based matchmaking. Without it, if you’re having a good time, it means your opponent is almost surely having a bad time, rather than keeping the matches close. At low ranks, often times a single piece of knowledge can escalate your play to a higher level, which can make those low ranks feel kind of swing-y, but I don’t know that that’s a problem that can really be solved unless you remove the asymmetry. That said, I no longer wish to substitute matchmaking for the likes of a server browser.
Can’t say I agree with you there. The handful of games I get around to in a given year that are pushing the state of the art still run well at high settings on my machine built four years ago. The number of games pushing that threshold are so few that I might get a longer life out of my machine than usual.
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’ve got a 3.5 TB hard drive that mostly holds video files and stuff, and there’s at least 1.5TB free at this point. When you’re playing games that predate solid state drives, that may as well be infinite space.