One way to get out of the video-game industry funk is to recognize that players aren’t spending $70 on most games
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You can go AAA for cheap no problem, people just need to not get FOMO‘d out of their minds and half-resist the compulsion to jump on the next shiny thing immediately.
The newest DOOM is around 27 Euros rn and not even a year old. Buy on release - or worse yet, pre-order - and you‘ll get the worst deal (financially as well as technically).
Game prices are fine for me because I literally just wait until they‘re at a point where I don‘t see them as a waste of money anymore. In the meantime, there‘s 203 untouched games in my Steam library that had reached that price at some point in the past already. Not even mentioning the hundreds of games I got for free between GOG, Prime, and Epic.
Basically do the same thing. Until a game hits $20 or less, I won’t purchase it. For $70, I would rather buy something useful like new shoes.
Counterpoint: It’s just so much fun when you are starting on release day, not getting spoiled, no one has a clue where what is there is no meta and a lot of community interaction.
E.g. Elden Ring, we started together at 12 am when it launched, killed the first couple of bosses. Then the next few days forums were filled with posts, people had different theories, NPC questlines were being discovered. It was the same two years later with the DLC. A friend of mine bought it finally and started playing last week. But he is .missing all of that.
Everybody values their money differently. If you think paying out of your ass for games is worth it for this, go ahead.
On that note, Dark Ages was probably my favorite game I played last year and was worth the cost new as well. For half price, it’s absolutely worth it even more.
That’s what indie games are for, instead of these absurd-budget blockbusters that often aren’t even fun, but also, the world just needs to be cheaper to live in. Games are first on the chopping block because disposable income for entertainment is always the first to collapse.
Unfortunately, some genres struggle going indie because they’re too expensive to develop and aren’t guaranteed to sell well. There is a reason PlatinumGames can’t afford to make Bayonetta if Nintendo doesn’t put up the money, for example, and almost every indie studio that attempts a similar feat has to spend years and years in early access.
The Genokids developer has been working on the game for +5 years and has only 2 chapters to show for it. Mahou Arms released on Steam in April 2020, and is still in early access today.
The world has become too expensive for some things to comfortably exist, or exist at all, unfortunately.
Become a patient gamer. This winter sale, I bought probably 25 games totaling around 30 dollars. It’s enough to keep me busy for the next 5 years.
This… Put games on your wishlist, set your wishlist to only show sales, and sort by price. Then only buy games from that list when they go on a significant sale. Plenty of decent games out there regularly go for $5-10 or less. With very few exceptions I refuse to pay more than $20-30 for a game and, even then, only if they’re like 50% off and not likely to come down.
Also… stop pre-ordering games. They’ll still be there when they do go on sale. You don’t need to play them as soon as they come out. Conquer that FOMO shit and develop some integrity.
stop pre-ordering games. They’ll still be there when they do go on sale.
Yeah but then I wouldn’t get the sick Cardi B Wet Ass Pussy character skin 😮💨
Yep. I’ve been waiting a half a year to get the Dark Souls franchise. It has paid off well.
I set a rule not to buy any game util i finish what I already have. I have not bought anything for the last two years. Any game that interest me is going to my wishlist for now.
You don’t even have to be that patient these days. I got Arc Raiders 3 weeks after release for 60% off, it was like $18.
Games should be cheaper to make, too.
See, that’s the conundrum: big companies make huge investments and want a ROI. They dump 100+ million dollars on a game with a team that’s over 200 people and expect 10x money back.
Shit has ballooned out of control in the corporate world and Indies have to fight tooth and nail against each other, bigger players, shovelware and older titles
How much of that money goes into marketing, and executive pay checks?
Well, many complex games have no budget on graphics, that’s why you can have one-man army dev making a monster of a game like Aurora 4x.
Yeah, and then the game made by a small team ends up being much more successful.
Gotta keep in mind that there are like a thousand other indie games released for every Hollow Knight or Stardew Valley. Survivor bias or something
Have you met our lord and saviour, retro gaming?
And the Son, Emulation?
Or the step brother, piracy?
The only problem is too much choice!
Seriously, when you’ve got thousands of ROMs and vintage PC games to choose from, it’s really difficult to land on one to play right now!
I went down a rabbit hole of emulation last year. I got PCSX2 and tons of games like Ratchet & Clank, Tak 1-3, Jak 1-X, the Sly series, Spider-Man 2, and so many others. I spent a good month and a half just playing old PS2 games and I had an absolute blast
Nice! I’ve been gradually playing through a bunch of NES classics: Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, Blaster Master, Fire Emblem. The next game I want to go through is Castlevania 1 and then Ultima IV after that!
Great news!
They are!
… Just typically not the overproduced and overpriced corpo ones.
Wanna drive down AAA game prices?
Stop paying them!
Support your favorite indie or AA game today!
Don’t like games with predatory microtransactions?
You’ll never believe this, but you can also just stop playing games with them!
Get all your friends onboard with the plan, fight the man!
I just played Escape from Ever After. Every bit as good and polished as the old Paper Mario games. $25. They cost $50-$65 back then.
… I’ve never even heard of it.
But I do love the old paper mario games!
So wow, now we have a real life example of actual organic word of mouth spread of a game, as opposed to just being a passive advertisement sponge!
I haven’t spent more than $30ish bucks on a game since … 2013?? I think the last game I paid full price for was gta5 on ps3
Do y’all not know about the bargain bin and steam sales…? Is everyone so up to date on their backlog you can’t wait a few months for that price to drop to 50%
It doesn’t take long, Doom the dark ages has already hit that discount a few times iirc
My friend, let me tell you about this thing called “Pre-order.”
There are plenty of “gotta have it first” people out there. Doesn’t matter if it’s a new phone, game, see a movie on opening day, whatever. Plenty of gamers want to be in Alpha and Beta tests (which FML they do nothing but bitch about as being unplayable) and shell out money for skins and early upgrades or level up packs. Vloggers and tiktokkers too or whatever who want to pull in the views as they play the new games.
These are the people the studios cater to. Not the patient gamers who wait for the product to go on sale 90 days down the road after the initial rush is over.
So as long as the people in the first paragraph exist that’s what the studios will charge.
Or live with AA and indie games like many of us do, at tell AAA publishers to get fucked by not spending money on their live-service crap.
Every time - every single time - I’ve purchased a major AAA game anywhere close to the release window in the past 10 years, it’s been a mistake. Pay a shitload more for a half baked, buggy, unfinished mess.
At this point I just don’t buy big time releases within 6 months of launch. Even when I’m certain of the game itself, it just ends up being a mistake.
I rarely buy games on release. Recently, ghost of yotei. While I enjoyed the hell out of it, it was shorter than I would have liked and had a very predictable ending. I didn’t feel burned, but I should have waited. The other was the new dragon age. I didn’t pay full price but it was still a lot and I knew within a few hours that it was going to be ass. I pushed through for a few more hours but the soulless writing and lack of weight behind conversations turned me off. I decided to forget it, and play inquisition yet again. Lastly there was forbidden West that I got with my ps5 which was a gift. Don’t regret that one, though it’s not without its flaws. None of them, however, did I find buggy or unplayable.
Just don’t buy Triple A titles.
The last “AAA” title I bought was elden ring for 30$ (unless you count Silk Song)
There are plenty of indie style, A or AA studios that are in the 5-30$ range.
The more people who move over to that type of mindset and buy from small titles, the more apt that large companies are going to lower their prices.
Retail price doesn’t even matter anyways. It’s more a placeholder to make sales seem more impressive with X% off to make people feel they are getting a bargain.
Games have been $60 since the 90’s and people need to quit bitching about this.
Games were more than $60 in the 90s.
But video games were limited by physical copies back then. Supply was limited, and it cost the publisher multiple dollars, sometimes in the double digits, to manufacture the physical goods to sell. But with that you got a usually complete mostly bug-free game (as in, if there were bugs they usually were not commonly found in normal gameplay), as patches werent really a thing and making physical revisions was expensive. You also got the entire game that you paid for, all the content in the game was available to you from your one purchase. You can lend it to a friend if you want, too.
Nowadays we get sold half of a game that barely works for $70, so you can get the other half by buying the next 14 $20 battlepasses and playing only that one game for the next 5 years to finally get all the content of the game. You also cant let your friend borrow the game.
I don’t need to pay for a dev team that is overbloated with too many people, a marketing team that thinks every ad needs to have a Beatles song, and an executive that just demands more profit. Dev teams need to get smaller, marketing budgets need to shrink, and executives need to be less greedy. They already make record profits, they do not need more.
Just to really put it into perspective: if a Nintendo64 game sold for $55, the developer would usually see a profit of about $6 or $7. Compare that to the immense profit that happens now. Its not even close.
haha, that’s certainly true for your Call of Duties and whatnot. But I will always gladly pay $60-$70 for a mainline Zelda game, especially for the physical copy. I agree that digital copies should be discounted.
60? Maybe. 70? Never until now. 80? Definitely never until now.
And the DLC and “Deluxe” editions… The price of a AAA game is well over $100 now.
Rimworld plus all DLCs is over $100 too, but could last you a literal lifetime in replayability. It’s not the price, but the price per quality content delivered.
D’oh. I could make a counterargument, but I don’t think it is needed.
true that.
Have they? I’ve seen many games costing up to $100 or more if you want the complete game.
Many standard editions of triple-A games have been chopped to the point where even the proper ending is part of DLC that requires a season pass.
Some design their games in such away that they can sell quality of life features or some kind convenience for players. (Basically subtle form of P2W)
Some have turned their games to billboards for DLC, micro transactions, season passes and even other games.
Pricing is dictated by what someone is willing to pay for it.
For me, $70 USD is too much for the average game that is being sold at that price tag because those types of games(AAA/AAAA) are:
- Broken at launch
- Unoptimized/framegen crutch
- Basic features missing
- Nickle and dimed to all hell
Again, not all, but the average AAA slop title usually has one or more of the above points.
BUT, that doesn’t mean that Indie games at $20 USD are a “steal” or “bargain” either. There are many Indie games I bought at their launch(Silksong), but others I have waited for a decent sale.
If everyone stopped buying games at $70 USD then prices would fall and/or projects going forward would be re-evaluated to either keep costs/expectations down. But people are paying the $70 USD so that price point is here to stay.
No they don’t. For every indie dev who made it there are 100s of software engineers doing some voodoo math 90 hours a week to make my triangle look cool getting paid literally half my salary.
Y’all screech and bitch constantly about an absurdly healthy and competitive industry. It’s tiresome.
Perhaps a privileged take but I’d be completely willing to pay way more for games with no micro transactions or other “live service” BS. Like if economics make it so that it doesn’t make sense to sell most high budget games for $70 without micro transactions then sell me one at $100. Video games were way more expensive when I was a kid and prices haven’t risen with inflation at all. Consider that Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time retailed for $59.99 in 1998 while Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom cost $69.99 in 2023. That is a 16.7% increase over 25 years, or an average increase of 0.619% each year. Meanwhile, average CPI inflation is usually ~2% per year.
Comrades, I think we found AG bondi.
Video games were way more expensive when I was a kid
They still are, for a kid.
Inflation this, inflation that, but the free money a person has has not increased. It has been going down for quite some time.
Also I’m pretty sure no one in the world is gonna look at a game and go „well if I buy this I’m gonna be homeless for 2 months, but if I plot an excel graph from 1990 to 2026 the price is down so I’ll buy it”
Fucking ag bondi logic if you ask me
Also, micro transaction exist because the poor CEO wants his 23 million salary.
I have kids and I have a huge library of games on Playstation and PC. What are they playing?
Fortnite and Roblox instead, which they could play for free if they didn’t want to get cool skins. So, no, games aren’t as expensive for kids as they used to be, except if they waste a lot of money in predatory schemes in games where they could play for free and just 1-2 things to support the devs.
“My kids are able to play someone else’s games, so games aren’t expensive for kids.”
…did you even read what you just typed?
You haven’t read my comment I guess.
I have a lot of games that I bought (mostly for max CHF 20.-, so max 25$), but they are only playing free live service games.
The price of new games isn’t a problem for me as they are still cheaper than what they were when I was a kid. In my country Switzerland, an expensive new game is stll less than CHF100.- when some Nes games were CHF120.- thirty years ago. Back in the Playstation 1 era games were around CHF89.- and now most Playstation 5 games are around CHF79.-.
And that’s not taking inflation into account!
Gaming is one of the few things which has become cheaper in my lifetime, especially now that I get a lot of old games on my Steam Deck and only racing sims on my Playstation 5.
For me the problem is that you can pay such an amount and still be subject to many popups begging for your money (microtransactions) or DRM’s (always online or others).
Or that, thanks to digital games, you’ll soon not be able to resell an expensive game that you didn’t enjoy enough to keep.
And also the fact that games aren’t really prettier than 10 years ago but that you still need better hardware to play them.
I think game companies really need to have a look at why their games are becoming so expensive, because I don’t think it’s because they are treating their employees better.
Too bad companies seek exponential profit due to line having to go up, so pricing games higher wouldn’t lead to killing off microtransactions even if priced at $200.
Companies don’t hit a point where they go this is enough money. They became companies because their mentality is this isn’t enough, and its only the a mount consumers are willing to pay that keeps price from inflating more like companies want.
Fuck $70+ games.
Where are these statistics from?
SteamDB.
Thanks! That’s a really neat link
