By all means, every increase in price is welcome, it’ll be that much less of a temptation. How are Concord and Fairgames doing?
Except costs went down when they switched from cartridges to discs, and then again to mostly digital.
So, no. It should not have.
Costs have ballooned, but on the production side, not the distribution side. Perhaps the reduced costs on the distribution side are partially responsible for prices remaining so stable in the face of inflation.
The costs only ballooned because the companies keep bloating themselves. It’s gotten cheaper to make games, but more expensive to run giant companies that pay ludicrus amounts of money to executives.
Yes, companies have made very bad decisions in what aspects of production to focus on in the last decade. They’re pouring more and more into ever decreasing rates of return on visual fidelity.
Visual fidelity but also the scope of the game in general. Why is Halo open world now? It didn’t make the game any better.
You can’t seriously think something like Cyberpunk or God of War or even Half Life 2 costs less than Super Mario World because they sell more digitally.
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.
Cartridges to discs were definitely a massive savings… and happened basically one and a half times (Sega to the CD and Sony from nothing to the Playstation)
Digital… is complicated. It definitely benefits the platform holder and lowers production costs for the major publishers (and makes indie games viable) but it also fundamentally changes marketing. Because people generally don’t browse the PSN Store to find new games. They only get recommendations from influencers. Whereas plenty of us have fond memories of standing in a Best Buy or Circuit City and picking what game looked good on the shelves.
But yes. I agree that not every single generation should have led to a price jump. But I can definitely see an argument for most of them to have raised the price of “AAA” games with tiered pricing beyond that. Because it really is a problem and not just for the major publishers. Indie games basically need to launch at an effective price of 10-20 bucks on PC to stand a chance and… that is great money for the small dev teams but not so much for a medium sized C/B tier game.
The huge win in digital for them was killing the resell market.
No used games means no competition from previous owners. Prices can stay at $60/70/80 forever without any user market forcing prices down.
Every media vendor wants digital only to cut production costs, but it’s really to own the market. Consoles did exactly that for decades. The shift to subscriptipns for not only online at all but also to “dont own games, just give us a monthly part of your invome forever” was them pushing this advantage to its maximum conclusion.
Only now, with falling sales and falling interest due to “quick media” like tiktok/instagram/etc, is microsoft giving up on its console moat and sharing all games across devices. Only a loss of relevance as an entertainment medium is forcing them to open the market up again.
People vastly overestimate the impact of reselling on games… and that actually includes the platform holders themselves.
20 years ago? Yeah, Blockbuster was a scourge and there were even some magazine articles about noticeable dips in profit when a popular movie came out (because parents would bring kids to the rental store) and so forth. And Gamestop became a big enough player that they allegedly contributed to the death of the PSP Go
These days? Gamestop is all but dead even though most major studio releases still have physical copies. Because the game itself is increasingly a loss leader with the idea being that people will buy DLCs or even sequels. Project 10 Dollars WORKED except now it is Project 30-90 Dollar Season Pass. And… at that point, it makes a lot of sense to just sell the base game for 20 bucks or even give it away “for free” as an IGC.
And a good point of reference is Nintendo. If they were only interested in shelf space they would do what PC games have done for closer to decades than not: just put a piece of paper in a box. Instead, they have the asinine “game card” system which avoids the cost of cartridges while still allowing for resell. And… you can all but guarantee that Nintendo ain’t doing things for the consumer. Hell, back when they were arguably THE leaders in console gaming, Microsoft basically began their death spiral by trying to do largely the same thing for the XBOX One (which also included things like software to support watch parties of shows with friends). If game reselling was such a massive blight on their revenue they would never have tried that.
Who chooses to buy games based on influencers? I rely on reviews.
Influencers/streamers show people the actual game. Youtubers/twitch streamers that review games would still fall into the “influencer” category.
Traditional game review media like IGN have been a joke for ages, so most people don’t seem to trust them.
And who writes those reviews? I’ll give you a hint. It starts with an “i”.
So in your world every review is only ever done by an “influencer?” Cause that would make a massive swath of the public “influencers” when generally those guys get paid.
…
You DO realize the entire point of a review is to influence others, right? Like, just because someone isn’t getting paid (also, the vast majority of the reviews people actually read/watch are either paid content or attempts at building a userbase) doesn’t mean they aren’t an influencer.
And yeah. While I would very much not say “a massive swath of the public” are influencers… a LOT of people online are influencers. Just like anyone who goes to the gym or plays b-ball in their driveway are actually athletes. They just aren’t professionals.
Yeah I just don’t consider things like Steam Reviews or things of the sort to make someone be considered an influencer. They sure as shit aren’t being paid, an if they are, than im owed a substantial amount of money.
The point of the reviews I read are ones that summarize, explain, and detail what an actual game is. The more neutral toned the better.
I would not consider simple reviews by your every day person to be someone I would EVER call an influencer, and if you tried, they would just be confused.
You don’t consider reviews influencers because you are a sane person with two functioning neurons to rub together and have not sucumbed to this social media brainrot that tried to fit everything into socia media labels that social media addicts can understand without having to think.
You DO realize the entire point of a review is to influence others, right?
No, the entire point of a review is to inform others.
But keep trying. I’m sure you’ll get it one day.
There’s only 2 sources I’ve properly trusted and i think they count as influencers
Yahtzee from zero punctuation and the guy from penny arcade.
I generally trust Skill Up as well
Cant even rely on reviews anymore… I forget what game it was, but there was a game had a massive pay to win scheme in the game… that was only added on launch day, so the reviewers copies didnt have it… So they gave glowing reviews on the gameplay, without the game having the pay to win store and all the gameplay nerfs that encourage using it.
People don’t browse the PSN store, because it’s crap. I mean, the steam store is pretty bad, but I still manage to just browse and bookmark some games there to get back to later.
I mean the discovery queue is pretty much on point except for the blockbusters they insert “because they are popular”. I don’t care whats popular, i care about what i like, roguelike indies and metroidvanias for example.
So should the quality.
And not just graphical quality.
Unfortunately you get half of the games and the other half is splitted in DLCs, season pass, and pre order bonus.
Which is to say that prices did increase every generation.
Definitely. I reckon on my first console I bought games for (2000 or so.), you could get a game roughly fifteen quid, within a few years (2005) it was 40 quid, and not long after that (Around 2010-2015.), £60. My wages didn’t increase like that.
yup 60-70 for the base game, 10-30ish for DLC, and then more for online play.
its an inverse situation with games. more expenisve lower quality, they tested how much certain fans will tolerate it, and then go higher.
One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.
There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.
New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.
As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.
Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.
yea, cant justify the orignal switch and shtty swsh games, and then theres the new switch too.
Yeah it’s hilarious to me they wanna charge more and don’t expect to sell less. Ppl would go from being iffy about indie games to checking them out more if 4 at base price cost what a AAA one does
There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era
What a struggle. Should we then have tripled the prices so the poor publishers could afford 2 sports cars instead? Or, hear me out, just play indie games that’s higher quality and doesn’t have a useless middle man.
How many sports cars were in the CEO’s garage during each era though?
how many HOMES or yachts you mean.
This is the fucktard that said he could not understand why people wanted to play old games
https://time.com/4804768/playstation-4-ps4-pro-psvr-sales/
“This looks ancient, why would anyone want to play this…?”
Fuck him
Um… show us how the salaries of game devs have risen compared with game prices?
“No” -John PlayStation
The title should read “Playstation US boss is mad that spending a ton of money making games look slightly closer to real life didn’t make people want to spend more to play them”
Not to mention the likely equal spending on advertising
The min wage and salaries in general should have increased with every generation. Me says.
When I first started working it was still back in the days where you were given cash in an envelope. After we were paid we always used to go out to a pub together for a few rounds, I rarely used to get through all of the change I’d been given, I never got into the paper money.
You used to be able to get a pint for silvers, these days you need to give them folding money for a bag of peanuts.
It’s a mad world.
as well as my salary. but it didnt.
He’s not wrong since games pricing hasn’t kept up with inflation. If it had we’d be buying $120 games. The problem is wages also haven’t kept up with inflation either. If gaming companies had increased the prices they’d have fucked themselves.
Instead, investors did the fucking, and now here we are.
I could also point out: If the main sales race was for the gold-plated base copy of a game, instead of nickel and dining people who only have nickels and dimes, then it’s possible we would have a gaming world entirely focused on churning out AAAA singleplayer experiences, back to putting out trilogies of obscure gaming experiences.
This is not blaming gamers for not accepting higher prices for incomplete games; publishers moved where the money was, and I don’t blame them. I blame the rest of OTHER industries for not updating their wages so the world is livable and people have extra for entertainment.
Gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies and forms of entertainment there is. The price I have paid per hour for playing my favorite games is miniscule compared to something like seeing a movie.
The quality of games did not improve, in fact game quality and diversity has deteriorated. The quantity of content has dropped off as well. Graphics fidelity and production costs have skyrocketed though.
Graphics are so superficial when it comes to games anyhow, why would anyone pay more for a pretty waste of time?
Edit: i am talking about AAA games here, obv there has been an extreme proliferation of indie titles
“Fancy graphics” also doesn’t correlate well with how visually appealing a game is. I would take Ori graphics over CoD any day.
Well, because purchasing power has also collapsed in that span of time, obvi
/s
Neither quality nor diversity are objective measures, and I’d certainly disagree with you that they didn’t improve.
Yes both very subjective. Accessibility and streamlining gameplay has seemed to be the focus. Developing unique, novel but also enjoyable new gameplay experiences? (the reason i believe most people game) That more or less ended with the Wii, Ps3 and 360 era of consoles.
I will, respectfully, still disagree with that assertion. Just because Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, and the like are on their umpteenth entry, does not mean that no more unique and novel games are being made.
I would argue that AAA full priced gaming space is not where that innovation has been happening in recent years, it has mostly been with lower priced indies.
Diversity and quality are both going to be difficult to measure objectively, and I’d argue both are still in better supply today. Quantity is far easier to prove objectively. Not only are there just far more games out there, but try some like for like comparisons of some of your favorite long-running franchises on How Long to Beat. Assassin’s Creed II was 20-25 hours; Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is 35-64. Halo 2 was 9-12; Halo Infinite is 11-20. Baldur’s Gate 3 is close to as long as its two predecessors combined. Call of Duty is three games in one now.
The value of a game’s Quantity is directly proportionate to its Quality though, starfield and its 1000s of repetitive planets are the perfect example of this. Would any halo fan rather play 20 hours of infinite or 20 hours of halo 2…?
Yes there have been outliers of increased quality and quantity over the last decade, but in the full priced AAA space nowadays, that is the exception not the rule.
Quantity is directly proportionate to quality though
I’d disagree with that premise. It’s not like they’re making just as much game in the same amount of time. Games are taking way longer to make these days than they used to. As I’m 70+ hours into Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and nowhere near done, they could have made about 2/3 as much game as they made, and it still would have been phenomenal and worth the price. The same goes for Baldur’s Gate 3, not to say that I’m unhappy about how much of it I have.
I don’t think the high quality games are outliers. We just have so many more games coming out these days that it becomes more and more likely that we get some bangers in that volume. EA or Ubisoft may be putting out fewer games because of how long they take to make, but they’ve got more competition than they did 20 years ago.
As the end user why should i pay sympathetically for the extended dev time of a product that hasnt tangibly improved for my uses?
Yes the price ceiling of $70 does not do justice to games like KCD 2, but all that matters for the end user is perceived value. If the perceived value of any game isnt going up, then it is difficult to charge consumers an increased amount.
KCD 2 and Elden Ring are great examples of RPGs with content that fans perceive as a great value, but only AFTER playing.
Maybe KCD 3 or Elden Ring 2 can push their perceived value beyond $70, but the simple fact is that the majority of AAA games DO NOT offer an amount or quality of content that gamers would consider to be worth $70, especially with the tiering off of content with various editions, passes and DLC.
It is just subjective that you and i disagree about the amount of games that cross the value threshold of $70, but the evidence of a $0 cost increase for full priced games over the past decade or so definitely seems like evidence towards my perspective.
I wish i could pay more money for higher quality games with more content, but the advertising for these products happens within a competitive and reciprocal market, and that market has a mean perceived product value of $70.
KCD 2 and Elden Ring have essentially wasted dev time/cost creating bonus content, although the perceived value towards their brands it has created, plus the positive IP mind share, will pay off for them down the road with units sold i am sure.
As the end user why should i pay sympathetically for the extended dev time of a product that hasnt tangibly improved for my uses?
That’s not the point I was making. The price you’re paying is the same, but they’re delivering more for the same price, which you argued they were not. Then you said that quality dipped when they made more, which I argued it did not, and the reason for that is because they’re spending more time making it, so they don’t have to sacrifice quality to build more game, because they can give it as much attention as they’ve always given it but for longer.
a good case study is swsh, pokemon, starting from that, it lower and lower quality, yet people sitll buy it,.
Ask everyone shoveling money and then praising remasters incessantly.
ahn they did? 40 and 50 USD on ps2 50 and 60 USD on ps3 60 USD on ps4 70 USD on ps5
Plus dlc and mtx nickel and diming, and special editions
Our wages too…
Supposed proponent of the “free market” thinks that the market was unfair to massive corporation. More at 11. /s