By all means, every increase in price is welcome, it’ll be that much less of a temptation. How are Concord and Fairgames doing?
What is with these people?
They are CEOs of company’s, yet they don’t seem to understand how capitalism works. What’s something is worth is depending on what the market will bear. If the market won’t bear a $90 game then it isn’t worth $90.
It’s a double edged sword
The factors that influence development costs in order to keep up with the quality of the times is no doubt complex, but at the end of the day you’re spot on. It’s only worth what the consumers will pay.
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.
I’ve recently decided that I’m not spending more than $10 on a game until I’ve cleaned out my backlog.
There’s hundreds of games in my backlog, so it’s going to be a while.
Capitalism and the free market is supposed to encourage efficiency and innovation in order to remain competitive in order to keep prices low… Is Sony against capitalism? Is it against the free market? Is in adverse to innovation? C’mon Sony … Stop being lazy.
Sony, Nintendo and Xbox are not true capitalism because their consoles are not free markets so of course they don’t like capitalism when they benefit from absolute control and can fix the prices for everything in their ecosystem.
The only true capitalistic store front is steam and funnily enough it’s doing laps around all 3.
Part of why steam is so successful is because they regularly do enormous discounts.
People come to steam because of how good the deals are but they end up buying quite a lot at full prices as well.
Yes, yes, and yes. By securing a monopoly you will have the highest possible profit at lowest possible investment. That is the ultimate goal of every publicly traded company.
This just shows execs do not understand why piracy diminished
Um… show us how the salaries of game devs have risen compared with game prices?
“No” -John PlayStation
Nope, not going to argue against obviously dumb points from executives. Do it. Raise your prices yearly. Fuck it, you think prices need to increase? Increase them.
It takes me five clicks to close Steam, open Firefox, open my favorite piracy site and download your game. Raise the fucking price, test how much I value my money versus five clicks.
Well if they’re gonna charge those prices, they’re probably gonna opt for Denuvo and then we can’t pirate it. But if enough of them do it, then we might see a concerted effort into breaking denuvo
There’s a handful of people out there cracking Denuvo games.
If anything Steam showed us thay 60$ game is a stupid idea. Free markets pay what they feel like paying and thats when creators and consumers are the happiest not with price controll.
Lol
The longer they take to lower the price of their game, the longer it takes me to buy it.
“There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era, …"
dude, fuck you, your parking lot and i wish that giant acme anvils drop on every fucking sports car you’ll ever own.
I’m pretty sure the few overpaid execs that are “fuck you” rich are still there, and they’re probably richer than ever. However now they probably consider themselves too important to park with normal people. It’s all about private jets and helicopters.
Tells a lot about this guy and his ilk that he thinks you measure a healthy company to how many assholes actively flaunt their money with shallow luxury shit.
Uhm, they have?
What do you mean? Our generous corporate overlords have kept the price steady for us at 60. We’re lucky they haven’t done scumbag things like a Deluxe edition for 80, a complete edition for 100, a ln ultimate edition for 120, an ultimate collector’s edition for 200, season passes for an extra 40, 10 different “micro” dlcs for 10 each, or cosmetic packs for 7 each. They’ve also definitely not cut content from the base game either!
N64 game prices were $60-75 back when the console came out in 1996… so no, they’ve been static for almost 3 decades.
But they production cost has gone way down with digital releases, no more shipping and inventory in many cases. Can reach way wider audiences with just internet. Plus all the kids that grew up gaming in the 90s now have money.
They made $2 billion in profits in 2023 in their gaming division. Sony can suck my tiny little dick dick, and I’ll even dip my nuts in soy sauce just so they can get a taste of home while they’re at it.
N64 games were upwards of 90-100 dollars for some.
The more expensive Sega Genesis games were $90.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
as well as my salary. but it didnt.
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
