Aka the market has rejected your overpriced bullshit. Adapt or die. Welcome to the free market.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a mega corporation and previously had the winning formula. You adapt to meet evolving market demand or you die.
These c suites got too comfy doing everything to only please their shareholders. They forgot that pleasing their consumers wasn’t optional. We are your money supply. If you lose us, it all comes crashing down.
I just started waiting as long as I needed to, years if necessary, for the games I want to drop down on a sale to under $20. I really don’t care how long I have to wait. There’s enough games out there now to keep me busy.
Best example of this is the borderlands franchise. Wait a year or two and get the game + dlc for 80% off.
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Yeah I pretty much almost never buy AAA games anymore outside of some very specific creators/franchises. Price is definitely a part of that, but the bigger things are creativity and business practices. Indie games are where all the new ideas are and where you get honest expressions of the artist’s intent. And you generally don’t need to put up with bullshit micro transactions, DRM, etc.
I’m not gonna pay $60+ for Call of Duty 500 when I can find full, fun, inspired indie games for less than $30. I will still buy the handful of more creative AAAs that do come out sometimes.
Same here. The last AAA game I bought was probably Diablo III, and I barely touched that piece of junk. I’ve learned my lesson and either pirate it to try it out first or wait for sales on Steam. My most prized games in my collection are the indie ones anyway, so I’m not rushing to buy AAA anymore.
I don’t have the time anymore, the price isn’t really the factor. Anything new has to compete with my existing library and backlog, and other things on my wishlist. It’s a problem that’s only going to get worse, games aren’t really aging out of relevance at the rate they used to.
And if I DO want a triple A game, I wait a couple of years and then for a Steam sale.
Good
AAA games aren’t worth $60+
No it’s the users that are the problem get more jobs idiots
Yah but the amount of shit games charging 3 dollars is insane. Really dragging down the median.
i almost never buy games on steam itself anymore…Even on the steam sales. The sales are a poor imitation of the great values that they were 10+ years ago, and quite frankly…the quality of games coming out isnt what it was 10+ years ago, either.
I subscribe to Humble Monthly and, eventually, get almost every game I’ve ever wanted.
I don’t even do humble monthly anymore. They’ve had periods of months and months where I don’t get anything I want to play or some obscure game that isn’t interesting. Its cheaper just to get the monthly bundle when I do see a game I want. Humble monthly was more than worth it maybe 10 years back.
i mean… you can pause your month and skip the shit you have no interest in…
I think in 10 years of being subscribed I’ve only felt the need to do it like…twice? i think
For me I’ve had to do it for more than 5 or 6 months so to me pausing isn’t worth the time.
yeah, if you’re interests are super narrow then yeah it wouldnt be good for you.
…until GTA6 comes out, then all bets are off.
I wouldn’t be so sure, matey! Yaarrghh! ⛵🏴☠️🦜
As an indie dev, this article is fucking stupid.
Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they’ve made in the last decade on Steam and it’s all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can’t launch at that price point anymore because they’re competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that’s $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That’s why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They’re complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.
Not only that, but charging full price for a game and then charging $15-20 for cosmetic DLC is fucking wild. If I’ve paid you $60+ for a title, I expect the full experience. If you want to add some shit a year down the line to lengthen the life, I’m on board, but day one DLC that costs more than the base game was played out the moment Bethesda graced us with horse armor. I’ve gotten more joy out of Vampire Survivors than I have out of any Ubisoft and EA games in the last 20 years combined.
Let’s see, 70-100+(!) bucks for the (yawn) twentyseventh COD with a 4 hour campaign, or 20 for a game that is complete and lasts for dozens if not hundreds of hours?
Yeah, my choice is easily made.
factorio has mods that last thousands of hours. they’re free additions, and the full game with its dlc is only like 60USD. is ridiculous.
THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW
I’ve got something like 200 hours in Vampire Survivors, and it cost me less than a fiver
The price has crept up with the paid expansions, but holy shit do NOT sleep on the Castlevania one. It doubles the base game content, and fits in great.
I’m burnt out on it at this point. In the whole bullet haven gameplay loop.
25 bucks? That‘s cute. AAA studios are charging $80 for remakes or $250 for DLC packages. They‘re out of their minds.
Almost all of the “Top 10 most replayable games” I have are Indie games, especially in the last 10 years.
They’re games like Factorio or Project Zomboid which I keep getting back to a year or two after I last played so much of it that I got fed up.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero, worse so for games which seem open-world but are in fact linear.
Mind you, some older AAA jewels in that style (such as Oblivion) do get me to come back eventually, but it takes something like 5+ or more as I basically have to forget most of the story before it’s interesting to play such a game again.
If Price matched “Hours of Fun”, almost all of the AAA stuff would be way cheaper whilst many Indie games would be far more expensive.
The developer of Barony is insane like the Stardew Valley guy, and just. never. stops. updating. I’ll play the game forever at this point.
Fallout New Vegas still hooks me in.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero
I mean, I gotta disagree, at least in part. Some of these games don’t age well. But I still know folks who line up for the “WoW Classic” experience. Hell, I know people who have been playing since the game came out in '02/'03(?) and now they’re out playing with their kids. I know one family who plays with their grandmother, ffs.
I think one thing that really gave Blizzard and Nintendo titles staying power was the choice to deliberately tack towards the cartoon-y style of art. When you’re not going for that hyper-real experience, the games age better. Hard to pick up a vintage Laura Croft or Devil May Cry without feeling its age. But Wind Waker? Mario 64? They do just fine.
For me it really depends on the game and whilst the “glitzy” is often an indirect indicator of a game which is limited in its replayabiliy - I suppose because often they’re games were there was much more investment in looks than gameplay - I should have added “highly curated” to that sentence since for me games with a story meant to be experienced in a certain way are pretty much “play once”.
Most of the games which I keep coming back to again and again in quite short cycles have emergent gameplay elements and even the entire game area is different from play to play - not just Indie Games like Factorio, Don’t Starve, The Lone Dark in Survival mode and Project Zomboid but also something like The Sims - whilst of “story” games, there are very few I go back to (as I mentioned Oblivion but also Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3) and when I do it’s after much more time, I suppose because I have to forget most of the story for it to be fun again.
My impression that in the last decade AAA has focused mostly on just two kinds of games - “Glitzy AAA open-world-ish” RPGs and multiplayer battle games - and for me the first have limited replayability unless they’re a world with A LOT of depth were the story is but a small part of the game, whilst I can’t be arsed to play the latter ever since online battlefields were swamped by kids in consoles as I really don’t have the patience to babysit somebody else’s ill behaved kids (still waiting for game makers to figure out that Adult Only servers would be immensely popular).
It’s not that AAA can’t do games with massive replayability, it’s that the AAA part of the industry seems to have gone down the route of games being either “curated experiences” or massive multiplayer were the emergent gameplay comes the actions of other players, whilst many Indies - having way smaller budgets - have gone down routes were the gameplay is “self-assembling” emergent, often with the game area being procedurally generated, which adds up to something less predictable were two runs of the game whilst sharing some similarities are in practice sufficiently different not to feel repetitive.
I gotta. The Rogue-like genre being the classic example of the indie game
