I’m a gameboy era dude, I don’t have that high expectations from a portable console.
To this day I managed to play to most AAA game I throwed at the Deck at an OK quality (low to medium) with good fps (40-45 fps).
But E33 just didn’t want to, and some area looked a lot different than on my 5 year old computer.
The manor, as an example, looks washed out and overexposed, almost white and grey, while on the computer it looked oldish, but acceptable. And I was on low settings on the computer 😅. So either it is currently bugged, or there is an hidden “very low” setting specially made for the Deck.
Honestly, and I say that as a 98% Deck player (according to last year Steam Recap), it is starting to lack horsepower.
I really hope the Deck 2 will allow for external GPUs when docked, because E33 really did put it on his knees 😅. Even at “optimized” settings (which you cannot change on the Deck), I was at 20-30 FPS unless I enabled XeSS. And even then it looked like shit 😅.
Journey is an Art masterpiece, but one that you need to already appreciate Art to enjoy.
I got friends to try it, some of them enjoyed the experience, others found it boring as hell.
And then you have Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, an AA indy gem that goes for what, 50€ ?
80€ games are a symptom of the marketing cancer that plagues modern AAA games. No need for a 1000 person team, what they need is passion for the medium, and a dedicated team that isn’t impeded by executive greed.
$60 in 1992 is about $135 in April 2025, inflation included.
Sure games became more complex, but tools became more powerfull, and so did computers.
In 1992 you often had to code your own engine, which amounted for a good chunk of the development cost. They had to do that using a ressource envelope magnitudes smaller than what we have today. Heck, a jpeg screencap of the original Mario game is bigger than the whole original game itself. Let’s not forget that games where physical, which had to be included in the final price.
Todays devs often uses off the shelf engines, tools that automate some of the tedious task, like making trees (Speedtree) and asset reuse is done on an industrial level, there are even marketplaces for that. Moreover, game distribution changed to be mostly digital, you don’t need to factor the medium price into the asked price.
You cannot really compare 1992 dev costs with modern ones. The whole way games are done changed way too much for that.
Moreover, the market has grown way beyond what is was then. The required profit per copy sold is a lot smaller than it was then, and thus should be accojnted for.
Honesty, I don’t see a AAA needing to have more than $60-70 atm, and I think this bump in price is entirely due to the ever increasing marketing cost, more than the game development.