Gaming, is joining everything else at becoming harder to afford.
Introducing a monthly subscription for next gen consoles and hiking game pass prices /s
Sadly that could actually happen at some point.
Already happening with cars and many things so it is inevitable
High quality indie games are very affordable <3
How well is she paying her employees?
The CEO is a she, Asha Sharma.
Thanks, I assumed it was the guy on the left on the photo.
I ONLY buy games when they’re on sale on steam, and they need to be like 60% off for me to even consider it
Use gg.deals or isthereanydeal sites. Both show sales from a kot of 3rd party (legit) sites that redeem on steam (and others but mostly steam).
Very worth using and don’t have to wait for a steam sale.
isthereanydeal can import your steam wishlist, and you can set a price threshold and other criteria on it. I have a $10 threshold on mine and there’s plenty of stuff on there all the time.
Perhaps making one game per decade is a losing strategey.
Edit: I heard a million excuses for that over the years from AAA industry, but my counter is just pointing to Capcom. Why can they keep up both output and quality?
There was a stretch in the late 90s where squaresoft released a final fantasy nearly every year for 5 years. Now it’s once every 7+ years. I don’t believe it should be that hard to make games these days. There are more people working on the projects, more tools and pre-made engines/libraries available. It’s purely a management/budgeting problem.
The problem is that making games (and software in general) has become more high-level, and enshittification has also gotten rid of highly skilled people. So the top studios in the industry are not capable of making resource-efficient, beautiful games anymore. Not because it’s physically impossible, but because they’re not geared for the processes and decision-making that would allow those games to be made.
When you switch from an artisan mindset to a mass-manufacturing and outsourcing mindset without exercising strict control you eventually become utterly dependent on service and product providers that will see to your costs going up so you’ll keep paying more for less.
All the large studios will come to a breaking point eventually because it’s unsustainable, and will be acquired for the franchise rights by corporations that make their money in unrelated industries. But the PC platform is also breaking down so this might be a moot issue in 10 years from now.
The more the hardware capabilities and our expectations rise, so does the outright complexity of making the games. I’m sure some of us would be fine with less ”bleeding-edge” games if they were otherwise written and designed great, but I think it makes sense, from publisher’s perspective, to hedge the bets and try to also impress with the fidelity of presentation.
If you are looking for a sofa and find one that smells a bit off but is otherwise functional, comfortable and looks nice, you might think you’d be able to live with the smell and buy it.
You almost certainly won’t and will likely regret the choice, but the sale was made and it’s a whole thing to do returns for something so big and hard to transport and move around.
That’s what you want to go for, even if you think it might smell fine. If it looks good enough, it might nor matter if it happened to smell rank ultimately. Numbers must go up!
Well no but also yes.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that’s $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Also minimum wage was $2.90 ($13.39). Median family income was $19,660 ($90,750.94).
And it was new tech.
So the prices have come down. There are a lot of amazing games that are cheap that you can play basically forever. Minecraft, Dead Cells, Skyrim, etc.
But our expectations have risen while our wages have come down.
So not wrong, but not right for the reasons you’d assume.
Bonus: A game you no longer play could still net something on the second-hand market, or maybe you’d trade it with someone. I know there was a group of people at my school that collectively had like two or three copies of the various Pokemon games they’d pass around, exchanging and loaning them on the fly.
Steam Family Sharing is a thing, but not quite so trivial to set up as handing them the cartridge. Never mind about reselling digital copies of games.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that’s $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Dunkey, is that you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q
First time seeing this, watched the whole thing, no lies detected. (Though he didn’t touch on my point about income.)
These people only care now because it’s actually affecting the bottom line.
Did they care when AAA pricing was lifted to $70 (base) as AAA quality took a nosedive? Did they care when “preordering” turned into “premium”? Did they care when microtransactions made some games into spend-to-win machines?
Hell, most of these clowns don’t even play games. Just more rich people putting on the hat they think they need to get away with a “hello, fellow gamers.”
Maybe the industry has a C-suite crisis.
“People are buying indie games instead and I’m not happy about it”
Not just indie games, every game. Every new game is in competition with every other game in existence. It’s a battle for recognition and attention, winners take all. Brutal situation.
Same goes for books, movies, TV, music.
It’s not: “Gaming is unaffordable.” it’s “People aren’t willing to give us more money.”
I seriously wonder if more competent mobile gaming picks up some of the slack considering the “retro emulator” machines are starting to run PC games via Game Native app. If i didn’t already have a steam deck i would seriously consider one of those devices.
I’m not convinced that we are going to see a renewed push for optimization. I think streaming will be aggressively pushed with low time limits in the forthcoming next gen to “make it affordable.” Xbox was ahead of the curve in that regard.
Why would I pay $70 for shit that’s super watered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator when I could pay $20-40 for something made with real passion?
I have enough that I could go out right now and drop $5k on a new PC build and not have it affect me.
My last mostly full build was in 2016. I’m still on ddr4 ram and just 6 months ago I upgraded my system to a used AMD R 5 5600x processor I got for $150 and an AMD 6600xt GPU I paid $200 for.
I’ll play one of the million older games I haven’t played yet before I ever spend so damned much on a new build or $900 on a console.
Whose decision was it to charge 70-80 usd for a game?
Whose ai investments are buying up all the ram, gpus, and ssds?
Not consumers’…
And don’t forget, everything is digital now, so that $80 game that you’ve completed in 2 weeks can’t be traded for any secondary value.
Seriously. These CEOs need to get their heads out of their asses and open their eyes. My gaming PC is from 2019. My newest machine is lower power than that. A steam deck. And they’ve ruined the steam machine pricing too.
AAA games cost a lot, use basically all the same formulas from the past decade or two, and are expensive to make. They need to target less lofty graphics if they want to sell more copies. Less and less can afford bleeding edge hardware. Now is the time to double down in quality instead of fancy graphics. And this is why they’re losing and indies are thriving.
Still a screamin deal as far as $ per hour of entertainment.
Adjusted for inflation, I paid ~$125.00 CAD for The Legend of Zelda when it launched on NES… For an 8 hr game…
The scale and quality of content delivered today is LIGHT YEARS ahead, and frankly, still the best value proposition in any entertainment media.
That fails to take into account the fact that the gaming was a niche hobby that wasn’t particularly accessible in part due to prices. Given the far far larger market for games and the greater competition for gamer attention you would expect prices to come down.
Prices are set base on what the market is believed to be able to bare however so value per hr or cost to develop are somewhat incidental to the monetisation of a game.
Prices for games have stayed constant for 35 years. Can you think of anything else that has stayed the same price in that time frame?
For real. Nintendo 64 was not a niche hobby, and the games were still 70 to 80 bucks. That’s like $160 in today dollars. It shows, too. We got all this technology, but the care, polish, attention just isn’t there.
That’s sort of my point… Prices are WAY down. Lower than they have EVER been. $125 for an 8 hr. game. What would that cost today?
Yar har fiddle de dee
Paying these prices is bullshit, you see!
They don’t deserve all your hard-earned money!
Come be a pirate!
There’s that passive voice, striking again
I mean, unless you play the last four decades of games in emulation… or the couple hundred thousand indie games on steam… or the other few hundred thousand mobile games or…
Oh, you mean your company profits are in crisis. Yeah. Good.
The amount of money the industry blows chasing PR with the tiniest minority of whiny “core gamers” is going to be the downfall of AAA.
The problem is that investors are brain-dead, so Forbes picking up on negative sentiment from 500 neckbeards can legitimately tank a publicly traded publishers stock.
The vast, vast, VAST majority of gamers don’t identify as gamers, don’t play 50 titles a year, and sure as hell don’t engage with gaming media or online discourse about gaming. 95% of games industry revenue is coming from people who don’t give a shit about gamer “hot button topics”.
The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.
