More resources are put in because there is an incredible amount of money to make with the game industry being bigger than movies and music combined. It’s no longer a niche upcoming industry but mainstream. And companies put in those resources because the market is that much bigger with more potential return on investment.
Game would $100 but the same as they are now. Could be $200 and it’d be the same as they are now and still have mtx, since why would a company leave the option to get more money. Few companies operate with the approach of this is enough money we are content.
And games have only gotten worse if you are looking at triple a titles the same way someone might say movies have gotten worse because they think high budget super hero movies are the only ones that exist.
If the market could sustain $100 it would be, but barrier to making and releasing games has never been lower. So consumers would just move to alternative games that are cheaper or old titles they haven’t gotten around to. And worst of all to these comlanies the top sellers aren’t always these high budget titles, but some indie title that’s not even 3d. Then there’s game pass people would just turn to if game prices went up moving more people to subscription.
Most companies needing $100 per unit for a game to be profitable aren’t going to bother approving that type of game to begin with over a game that can be priced $100 and have much broader mainstream appeal.
Why would a company want to risk putting money into a game so niche it needs $100 per unit over a game that can make more money despite being priced $60. And you know… Just price it $100.
If a game today came with a nice solid box, a cloth map, a 250 page manual that actually explains almost everything about the mechanics of the game, and WAS FUCKING FINISHED WHEN I BUY IT, getting maybe one patch and otherwise never changing, then I might be willing to pay more.
The ability to patch games has been a huge improvement, but it has also caused most games to release in state that is worse than older games ever were. Maybe after 6 months to anyear a modern game is at a comparable level of finish to older games, but only if it sold well. Lots of games don’t get the patching they need.
Yes Mario 64 has a lot of glitches, but it’s playable all the way through. Similarly superman 64 is notable for being a buggy Ness because it was uncommon. BG3 released with multiple game breaking bugs, same with Stanfield. Payday 3 has several crashing bugs, but nothing gamebreaking beyond overloaded servers.
The MSRP for Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges in the mid-80s, adjusted to today’s U.S. Dollar, would average around $150-200.
I don’t think games should cost that much, but we stuck with the $60 price point for literal decades so it’s not completely unreasonable for someone to talk about raising prices.
(I also write this while having only bought one game? two? In the past year.)
Resident Evil 2 sold about 4.5 million copies on PS One, Resident Evil 2 Remake has sold around 12.5 million copies so far and climbing.
They’re making more money now than they ever did, even with games costing more to make. More customers is supposed to equal economy of scale, not fuck it lets charge out the ass so executives can make more money than they’ve ever made in history.
The economy of scale is what lets companies operate at higher costs. According to Wikipedia RE2 cost about $1 million to make. $1m might still buy a PS1 caliber game, but the remake cost at least an order of magnitude more. Many games now cost nine figures; GTA6 apparently cost $1 billion.
I’m not saying games should haphazardly inflate with everything else for the sake of share holders, but I’m open to the idea that the formula used twenty years ago to decide that AAA games should cost $60 might be out of date.
That formula has to include charging what the market will bear. They can certainly increase the price and sell fewer copies, and maybe that’ll be more profitable for them in the end, but they certainly can’t jack up the price and assume all their current customers will stump up to grow their profits.
People’s income hasn’t increased all that much, the wealth gap in many countries has only grown. Games cost more when they were a niche product, and cost less when the audience and potential sales grew. Maybe they’d prefer their billion dollar industry went back to being more niche and only for the wealthy.
Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don't have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.
If selling at the current rate wasn't profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.
Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don’t have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.
Certainly a factor that should be included in determining what a game costs, as is the 30% off the top taken by Steam, Microsoft, and Sony for most digital sales. Distribution in 2023 was not a factor in determining the current max price for a standard edition non-sports game, which was set in the early 00s.
I’m also comfortable seeing games that cost less to produce carrying lower price tags, as in many cases they do, Hades and Hi-Fi Rush coming to mind.
If selling at the current rate wasn’t profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.
They continue to make $60 games, yes. No one can say whether some company would have made the greatest game of all time last year if they’d been able to sell it for $70, or $80 or $100. Maybe they’re making it now as GTA6.
Ah, sorry. It stands for “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price.”
In the U.S. the law doesn’t allow a manufacturer to require that retailers sell their product at a particular price, but they’re free to “suggest” one so that’s how we ended up with the MSRP.
It doesn’t carry any real weight, but it generally serves to anchor consumer expectations for a product’s value. (It also gives retailers an easy metric to compare sale prices against.)
The problem is the game industry, in the meantime of never going beyond the $60 threshold, found a far far more lucrative way of making money than just raising the MSRP. In fact, they found multiple ways of making money: skinner boxes, loot boxes, micro transactions, season passes, FOMO storefronts, etc etc. And even though we may agree that the MSRP eventually has to increase, they won't suddenly give up on those anti-consumer, predatory practices.
It’s not unreasonable but at the end of the day, we buy these games to waste time. There’s not a whole lot of justifying why im going to spend more on something i use to just unwind when i can buy plenty of 20$ games that will give me hundreds of hours of entertainment
I get that and i bough baldurs gate full price on release, but as the games start creeping up past 70 to like 100, it’s like for what? I can just not spend this money. It’s not like a car i need to get to work and car prices were skyhigh last summer and fall for example, or food, etc. If gaming companies cant compete on wages with other tech businesses that need programmers, they’re just gonna have to make do with less manpower. Long winded way of saying inelastic market.
Adjusted price is a common talking point here, but it ignores the other side of inflation... that wages have stagnated and rising prices obviously means that people have less spending money.
Consider also that there is a lot of choice with the back catalog on PC as well as free games (that people can make in their spare time at no cost thanks to FOSS tools and free information). Pre-broadband, gaming was more of a take-it-or-leave situation.
So yeah, I think most people already see increasing prices as being motivated by greed. And some people likely see the $60 price as already greedy when games are often filler and spectacle (with poor QA testing on top of that, because they know people will pre-order it anyway, and then buy the later DLC or cosmetics).
They sell vastly more games than before. And there isn’t a media anymore. And they should have increased their productivity in all these years.
Video games are not a good. They’re a digital product, a service. The cost is completely decorrelated from the amount you sell. Which is why it is so profitable.
The MSRP for a NES cartridge includes the circuits, the manual, the box, the physical space, the license and a finished game. Do you get any of these with modern AAA games?
To be fair, he is partially right. It’s insane that games have basically been the same price since forever, the only reason they stayed the same is cuz more people could afford computers/consoles and in contrast to every other industry, making a new either physical or digital copy of a game is dirt cheap, so the more users the more profit.
Idk if it actually makes sense for games to be more expensive yet tho.
Prices are comparable because a cartridge in the 90s was as expensive, comparatively, as an SSD is today. Have you ever bought a game and received a free SSD with it?
You also have to ignore economies of scale. Nintendo was a huge consumer of chips globally just for gaming. That market is now mature, and gaming isn’t as big of a piece as it used to be. There’s also way more games being sold now, call of duty gets more day one sales than most n64 games ever sold, which made disc’s super cheap. Now you have digital distribution which is practically free, and companies are getting more of a games price than ever before and it’s still not enough.
Eh, more competition is good. This opinion is pretty basic.
From memory Epic has improved rates for developers/publishers - why the fuck wouldn’t you want that/just be ok with a base 30% cut because of some shitty ideal?
Epic also tried to datamine their users with literal spyware, their store is shit with no features, they gained market share via exclusivity deals (I shouldn’t need to explain why this is bad, yeah?), their CEO is a POS with horrible takes, Tencent has a large stake in the company… If anything, your opinion is shallow.
Ahh, so you can only have good competitors? It’s either a monopoly (which is only as good as the CEO in charge, and with time will go to shit), or competitors which do the same stuff and play nice?
This is reality. And you get good competition, you get bad, but in general it’s good for the consumer to have options. Fuck it, I’m actually completely happy using Valve for most things and then getting free games from Epic.
The view that a monopoly is better is just extremely short-sighted and naive. Similar to a “We should just have a dictator! This one guy is really good now, what could go wrong in the future?” type thinking.
Hurr durr, a monopoly is bad because the person in charge could become bad, so I’ll actively help this KNOWN bad actor to get a foothold in the market. I am very smart
That a new person to Valve would be equal to Epic, as opposed to massively running Steam into the ground in a significantly worse way. It’d be easy for some dumbass to suggest a subscription service is needed for Steam for example, you need to may $10 a month to support it. Whelp, Steam is now shit.
You assume I’m helping Epic whatsoever. I get free games, that only costs Epic… So yes, this is helping me and costing Epic. Net win for consumers.
If a developer/publisher wants the choice to pay lower fees they can do so via Epic. It’s great they have the choice, I support devs being able to do what works best for them.
There’s no hypocrisy there - it’s just logical that it’s a good outcome to have competition.
Perhaps I should turn the argument around - why is a monopoly by Steam a good thing? Long-term it’s completely unsustainable and they will do bad things, so why would you support that?
I’m not assuming jack shit. I’m factually stating Valve/Steam are currently great for the gaming industry and Epic is toxic refuse.
This opinion is in no way unpopular. Valve is privately owned and headed by a single individual with tremendous purpose of will, which is how they’ve done so many great things for the gaming industry. The issue lies with said leadership vacating their role (GabeN is getting old) and some greedy bastard taking the company in a wholy different direction. tl;dr: we need a strong competitor, but not now, and ABSOLUTELY not Epic.
Are my exact words from this very thread.
You assume I’m helping Epic whatsoever. I get free games, that only costs Epic… So yes, this is helping me and costing Epic. Net win for consumers.
Did you think Epic’s financial department had an extended vacation or something? They don’t give a shit that you downloaded the game they made available for free, that was the whole point of their stunt and they were prepared to use money in order to claw some market share.
If a developer/publisher wants the choice to pay lower fees they can do so via Epic. It’s great they have the choice, I support devs being able to do what works best for them.
And I boycott devs who sell their souls for a quick buck. Darkest Dungeon is one of my favorite games of all time - I still haven’t bought DD2, even though it was made available on Steam after the period of exclusivity elapsed.
it’s just logical that it’s a good outcome to have competition.
Except it isn’t. It’s only good to have good faith competition of well behaved market players - Epic does not qualify.
why is a monopoly by Steam a good thing? Long-term it’s completely unsustainable and they will do bad things, so why would you support that?
Again a horrible question. Something doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be markedly better than something else. Steam is, right now, no questions asked, infinitely better than Epic. Why support a shitty company that would happily bring everything crumbling down if it meant a quick buck?
Valve is good now so it doesn’t need a competitor? And only when it goes bad should another company exist as competitor? This makes no sense… It’s just not how the world works. Once you have a monopoly it typically stays a monopoly. Look at any of the current monopolies - many are going to shit like Google but there’s no real competition regardless.
You’re also discounting the fact the opposite fact - Epic might be terrible now, but change leadership and its now amazing.
You’re buying way into a very specific case of looking at where things are at now and making a judgement VS. Thinking of longer term ideas like competition is good.
Also, is steam infinitely better than Epic? That’s very debatable, I have no issues with either. To be honest, they’re much of a muchness. You may just be too heavily emotionally invested in these companies. Realistically, they are both just trying to make as much money out of you as they can. For instance, Steams use of their market and giving out digital cards to collect and level up is very predatory.
What spyware? The CEO has been a big advocate for lowering store prices (including Google and Apple stores) to help smaller developers. Their exclusive deals have also helped a lot of developers get their games made. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a game developed these days. Xbox, Sony, Nintendo all have exclusives.
As an indie gamedev, yes, I DO know how hard it is to make a game – I also don’t think getting funding is worth selling your soul for.
They don’t want to lower percentages and prices to “help smaller developers”, but to gain market share. Your brainless whataboutism on consoles is also irrelevant – it’s bad there too. The only acceptable exclusivity is when the company behind the market also happens to develop (not fund) the game.
Look up the concept of loss leading. Do you think Epic are really just doing this for the benefit of developers or are they after something more insidious?
But that’s ok - this is why competition is good. Devs make some more money, consumers get some free games.
Even if Epic ends up only matching Steam then this is a net win for people.
Asking for a monopoly is just short-sighted. Gabe leaves and then the next person in line is some $-hungry mofo who makes terrible decisions and you end up with a shit system. You need competition to keep things in check.
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