"Overpriced Games"

by ‪@PirateSoftware‬ • Are games over-priced?...
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[@dylan4125]

Remember when digital games where like $10 cheaper because they didn't have to make the disk/case, didnt have to house or ship the product, & didn't have to work with retailers?

[@Skagzi1la]

That was just to get people used to not owning games, you was just renting a temporary license.

[@Zerker102]

The actual reason I made my steam account.

[@skartimusprime4779]

Bro as an Australian I remember a brief amazing window when we didn't have regional pricing on Steam so our games weren't $100, they were $50 like in the US. It was amazing 😢 By the time the Orange Box came out, that was already fading away, you could tell because Valve still have us at that pricing but full publisher catalogues were matched with physical retailers again.

[@user-fh6pw5dx1d]

Corporate greed got rid of that LMAO. These companies are making so much money they are feeling like they can bully the customers. Most ppl are broke AF and soon we won't be able to afford the products they are trying to sell us

[@Patrick-cc7qm]

If digital games are cheaper then retailers will suffer. And they won't able to earn anything. And they already don't earn much due to having to pay a cut of the profits to the makers. Both prices are the same to give both industry a fair chance to make profits. So unless you want the local stores to go down in business it's fair to say the companies has to do this keep the hardware stores alive and continue the relationship of both industry.

[@Saint_Wolf_]

Why can't games be cheaper? Because the money they allocated to physical production now goes to overhead, management and just the hen-pecking, skill killing, soul draining, talentless technocratic overseers.

[@ImLaughingAtYou]

They can be cheaper. Wait a few months to buy them.

[@muneshxge]

Can't get cheaper than $0.00 😅

[@T3n50r]

Bs like woke advisors telling them what they can and can't put into a game they have 100% creative freedom to produce, and PR campaigns to overshadow how little they pay their devs.

[@jcfra420]

So tired of this attitude. It is not just the cost of the "overlords", it is also the cost of a buttload of more developer position that are not really needed. Talentless? Yeah the majority of developers today Are talentless. They have very little artistic talent to come up with ANYTHING original. Instead of having maybe 2-3 writers, now they have to pay for a room with 20+ writers, so everyone's idiot idea gets included. That is why there is terrible character development and overall stories in media today. The dev's of old have moved on, and the new class is trash. That can only do self inserts and make the games their own personal therapy session. Game development has ALWAYS had to deal with those overlord publishers, but they still could put out something of quality, nowadays...not so much.

[@flaer5930]

...And looks like it costs them even more than physical production & shipping did. Someone will probably say about piracy that comes with digital distribution, I'll just wait for someone to do this to remind about used disk market.

[@Disarmedquill]

in 2011 i paid $150 for skyrim collectors edition and got a alduin statue, cloth map, and a artbook. now all i get is some cosmetic skins and a discount on future dlc

[@MagicMonkey96]

The only digital premium edition I bought was for a sim game because I knew all the dlc I was getting and that it was all high quality

[@roadent217]

"in 2011 i paid $150 for skyrim collectors edition " ...why?

[@probulbZ]

@@roadent217 I think he answered your question further into his comment

[@Jadee95]

and you can play 2 days earlier

[@demottt]

A statue with an immediate resell value of 100 dollars, and an increase in value if the game goes the way Skyrim did.

[@monawoka97]

I'm gonna be honest a game having 100+ hours of content is not a value proposition to me. Hours of content means nothing. Most of the time those hours and hours of content are collecting secret blueberries hidden behind waterfalls. Quantity != quality. I'll take 14 hours of life changing Outer Wilds experiences over 400+ hours of assassins' creed completionism grinding any day.

[@hooligan9794]

Very true!

[@darrellmcclanahan7036]

Still have yet to play outer wilds actually

[@user-uh7kx3ez7w]

Yeah sounds like musou games “1000’s of hours of replay ability” but you’re doing the same mission like 300 times with 1 difference each time

[@r.five.3]

Only Outer Wilds players understand this concept. Truly the best game I've ever played, and I have less than 20 hours in it.

[@monawoka97]

@@darrellmcclanahan7036 Don't look up anything. Go in as blind as you can. It's the best game I've ever played and it's not even close. It legit made me realize I can still feel wonder and awe as an adult.

[@hunterosophy]

69+ dollars for a game was already fucking nuts to me but paying over $100 for a new release is outrageous

[@Akanezulian1]

I will wait 5 years for a 80% off sale or just never play it out of spite if they think they can get away with charging 100 bucks for a digital game.

[@Omen_a]

Depends. Id pay 100€ for Baldurs Cate 3 in a heartbeat. Already have over 150 hours in, thats really good money/hour rate. Would I pay 100€ for an Ubisoft title? Absolutely not.

[@JackCrossSama]

99 of the games that are 70$ are overrated, ghost of tsushima a prime example of this just another assassin's creed clone that takes place in japan. The only two games that are worth a damn are Elden ring and Baldur's gate 3

[@CarTastic-fv6eo]

This is just to force us over to subscription based systems as we see with Ubisoft, thats why they keep doing this. They would be able then to keep bare minimum and justify it as a subscription thing.

[@GHOSTSTARSCREAM]

As a Canadian. Games have been like 70cad for atleast the past 15 years.

[@Boss_Fight_Index_muki]

20+ years ago, PC games came in a A4-sized full color printed (embossed) cardboard box and included a printed manual, pins, cloth maps of the game world (if RPG), and the disc. Eventually, it turned into a 7inX4.5in mini box (non-embossed) and the disc came in a sleeve rather than a case. And no extras. Now there's no box (embossed or otherwise), no manual, no maps, no pins, and no disc.

[@_Kremit]

But now you get the sound track and the digital art book as a PDF. Isnt that what everybody wants *cough* *cough*

[@multibeasty]

@@_Kremit art book they will censor later on

[@dreimar1796]

in the past there was also huge cost/management of distribution of said boxes!

[@kureyzee2489]

Oh, those are still included.... in the collector's edition which costs so much more, bloody hell 😂

[@dreadequation7320]

And costed twenty times more to produce then compared to now.

[@4nanaide]

There were some comments during the stream that I don't know if were ironic or not, on the topic of South America and their economy, but I'll give a small answer anyways. "how do you have a pc if you can't afford a 5 dollar game" the answer is simple, a game doesn't provide the same value that a computer does, you can save money, buy a computer and have something that will not only provide you with entertainment but also help with your studies or work. There are tons of good free games, and piracy is pretty much the norm in South America. "If you can't afford $2 you can't afford an internet connection" I'm guessing they meant a 2 dollar game, which again, doesn't have the same value as an Internet Connection. They obviously will prefer to pay for Internet than for a game. Internet costs more because you pay monthly etc etc, but if a game is more expensive than what you would pay for Internet, Electricity, Water, etc in a month, then buying said game is not feasible. There are people in South America that can afford to buy whatever they want, but a huge percentage can't. Everything is expensive, from food to clothes, books, public transport to technology, candy, toys, etc. It's not just "a 2 dollar game vs internet" is "a 2 dollar game vs everything else". It's not the developers' fault though, I have friends from South America that have said to me how sad it is for them not being able to buy a 10usd game, how 10 dollars doesn't seem like much, but that at the same time for them, and their economy, 10 dollars can mean a lot and nothing at the same time.

[@FZJanimated]

Im from argentina. The problem is that our average salary is around 230 us dollars and alot of people make even less than that. Now without regional prices. You cant expect us to pay a 60 or 70 bucks game... thats ridiculous. We upgrade our pc every 10 years or more. Witch is alot of effort and money to save enough to get a mid or high spec pc. We can afford to do that because it will be worth it because after thar we just pirate the games. There is no point to but them legally without the regional prices. If we did that at most we would play like one game per year lol. Is a shame my country economy went downhill and now we dont have regional prices. Used to buy games legally through steam but now im just pirating them.

[@abel4542]

A decent computer costs around 422 dollars here in argentina, internet is 10 dollars a month, taking into account a NORMAL avg salary is 422 dollars (The people that say less than 300 are only taking into account people that live being exploited, not the real average). Having said this, why the f*ck would anyone buy a game that's worth 6 months of internet bills? 60 dollars is an unrealistic price to ask in Argentina.

[@rory8182]

@@abel4542 welcome to localising prices, I remember that Pirate Software spoke about that

[@JustMatchmaking]

There's also a lot of people who don't even own a computer, and use things like internet cafes and public library type machines in order to play games instead.

[@partnermammoth2562]

its like saying how can you afford a car if you dont want to pay 20 dollars for parking

[@Volvith]

So let me put this in terms where everybody can understand this: _Cost isn't calculated on currency worth, but on relative income._ When my parents bought a house, they bought it for 280K. That same house, today, is over 550K, before bidding (add a 100K). I today, earn the same as my father did back then. Inflation doesn't make these kinds of things better when you realize that wage compensation based on inflation has been lagging behind year over year by as much as 40% relative to total yearly inflation. What you're looking at is not a game that costs 100$. What you're looking at is a game that costs 100$ in an economy that already bleeds you for everything it has, that refuses to compensate you for the damage caused by reckless economic management by central banks and government entities alike, and that calculates your obligations to the state based on the inflation they determine themselves to suffer from. Inflation calculators are lying to you. Because inflation isn't a metric of how easily people are able to spend. That metric is called wage compensation, and that's stopped being proportional to inflation since the 70's.

[@gavinthedragon]

That was regan who did that right? The wage compensation thingymabobber

[@BlindSp0tz]

​@@gavinthedragon"I didn't understand a single word that you typed, but I still want my opinion on the matter to be recorded"

[@CBear]

I don't pay full price for games anymore because they always release as broken. If you want me to pay more, deliver a finished and good product

[@BartMK]

Same bro, either sale or isntant gaming. Most games are just a money grab/scam Make a good product i will pay full price, same

[@shamsheed1726]

Exactly.. alot of releases now are unfinished and some even tell you that the game might not develop any further.. it’s like they half hope but have a cash grab exit

[@sicsempertyrannishonk7197]

This. 100%. I don't mind paying good money for a quality product. I just haven't seen a quality product on release in a loooooong time.

[@JuffBeezos]

Yup. Honestly, I just don't even play AAA games anymore. Even if they work, they are boring. My only two exceptions in the last 8 years were Cyberpunk and Starfield, both bad choices to buy at full price on release.

[@Bach_Treebane]

lookin at you bethesda

[@xElohs]

2:36 "you have to have more customer service" is a wild take when 90% of games you cant find a support email address to email them about issues

[@Nobody-vr5nl]

Ur just bad at the internet. Almost every single site has a contact us link at the bottom of the webpage.

[@kedolan4992]

@@Nobody-vr5nl If it's not live support, that hardly counts. A lot of the time you use those forms, you don't get a response for a week or more, and chances are it's just going to be a bot saying something along the lines of "working as intended, piss off"

[@sasori2425]

​@@kedolan4992ill add to this also contact us area doesn't mean the customer service is trained on helping you with a game glitch issue. They aren't exactly coders you are getting sent to so how can they even help other than saying things like oh hey we'll bring this up with the team or add the glitch to the list.

[@zakofrx]

​@@kedolan4992its all AI rubbish support now.. In the past you would speak to a real person .. A real person who spoke your language without a strong accent.. A person from your country..

[@coldorange5]

And even then is answered by a bot

[@bpampolini]

"It's crazy how many gold farmers now, are from South America" Man, it was always like that, our money = shit. Runescape gold is worth more than the Venezuelan currency. Let that sink in.

[@manticore5733]

I grew up in the 80s, you'd buy a game then for £10 (so say ~£30 in today's money) and play it for 3-4 months and again 6months later and again 20 years later and you'd lend it to a friend to play too... there would be no adverts, no add-ons, no expansions, no monthly server fees, no skins, etc. etc. You'd have a physical copy of the complete game with no dependence on external servers etc so provided you still have a working computer that can run it - you can play it. You also had a lot of 'freeware' and 'shareware' - a time when people made games for others to play without them just being loss-leaders fleecing you for optional add-ons that make the games playable! There are still plenty of people out there that do this... but you can't find them due to how "play store" etc are designed: you can't search for games that don't have adverts and don't have in-app purchases - even though those are two fundamental flags used by those stores! I stopped buying/playing 'latest games' when they started relying on remote servers and stopped buying consoles when they switched to non-physical media.

[@TheTuttle99]

Ok grandpa let's get you to bed

[@manticore5733]

@@TheTuttle99 Hee hee hee... * coff* *coff*... oh you young 'uns never give us enough respect.

[@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7]

Imagine having to download browser extensions and querying backend APIs just to be able to filter your searches by "not shit". This is a mad world we live in.

[@lexolus1308]

The real problem is the game coming out as 100 dollars and then having microtransactions + pay to win+ paid battle pass + paid 60$ dlc's, back then you paid for the game and thats all you could pay for, the only game people complained back then was WoW having to pay expansions/game/sub

[@seankelley9347]

Still stupid you gotta pay for the expansion and sub still

[@richardgesegnet5481]

We never listened back than either. When people stop paying for it, we will be free until the next new scam

[@GX-105D]

if games were $100 there wouldn't be a need for cash shops

[@ivanpabon2741]

And expansion. And collectors edition. I stll wish I kept my gears 1 tin. That shit was cool

[@StonedSolid]

@@GX-105D Do you honestly thinks publishers would just get rid of cash shops if they charged $100 for games? Because I dont think they would. There was a time not all that long ago when microtransactions were only in f2p titles, and slowly but surly were added to full priced games. The exact same thing would happen to $100 games, zero doubt in my mind.

[@shiraisan3779]

incomplete games charging $100 is crazy. $60-$70 is already too much for that quality we’ve been getting.

[@Timithos]

Just the incomplete games is crazy.

[@argovalentine2368]

Completely agree. Only a few games come out near finished enough. Funny enough it's inde games more often for me now cause I stopped buying AAA games for bit now

[@GamerofOld]

@@argovalentine2368 I can't stand this! why does buying something mean nothing now?! This is why I will stick to physical media as it is the ONLY way I feel like I have value when I buy something. I know we are going towards digital only but it is like buying air.

[@Spacecoke]

​@argovalentine2368 indipendants can even get greedy too these days. An example is the steam sales. Tons of games are at 80 or even 90% off but BG3 and HW3 sitting at £40 which is only 20% off. this was a big suprise for me as BG3 has had its glory days and HW3 is doing terrible... and it was crowd funded..

[@johntsiroyiannis1072]

​@@Spacecoke 40quid for one of the best games ever made is a steal mate. BG3 is not the aggravator in this industry, far from it.

[@MikMoen]

For Elder Scrolls: Online, every yearly chapter expansion costs about $40 base at launch, but after a year when the next chapter comes out, ZOS bundles all of the older content together with the base game, for free, so new players get everything current players get without paying a shit ton.

[@OrchidAlloy]

That's exactly what every game should do

[@sabin97]

i used to play guild wars got almost all the titles. so played for quite a few years. the way it worked was that you buy the game. and you get to play, forever. you dont need to buy anything for the extra contents. you get it because you already paid for the game.

[@dougthomas8968]

I will gladly spend $100 on Chrono Trigger I will NEVER spend $100 on Call of Duty: Whatever

[@_boux]

in 1999 the average household income was about 68k, today it's 74.5k, if they want the price of video games to follow inflation, nobody will buy games anymore, everyone will pirate. Also back in the 90's, when games were "$150", nobody bought games, we would just physically go to a store to rent a game for less than a tenth of the cost of the game and then beat the game in a weekend. Game piracy was also WAY more common

[@pea2nuts809]

Exactly... You didn't have to waste $70 on a game you didn't even know you'd like when blockbuster existed. By piracy do you mean like PS1 and dreamcast? I didnt think we had flash carts back then for cartridge based games. There was stuff like gameshark which could be used to copy the game files, but then youd need an emulator

[@codyvandal2860]

You could also "trade" them to your friends

[@SchnitzelCFC]

Thank you for providing context. Something that's almost always missing from Asmons reaction videos and his takes to them.

[@mateussoares3569]

and back then they sold a fraction of what is sold today

[@Arkantos117]

Also back in the 90s your money went further in every other facet of life.

[@cozenw3236]

Same thing with e-books. When e-books first became available, they cost between $.99 to $3.00 and the physical copy was around $7.99 - $10.00. Compared to a physical copy they were cheaper because they weren’t paying for ink, paper, and binding. Now you can’t get an e-book for less than $4.99 and the physical paperback $16.99. ( and that doesn’t include the higher price for a hard cover). It wouldn’t be bad, but these 3-books are not proofread and contain many errors due to the lack of editors because the author skipped over that cost. Worst, there is a lot of self publishers who place their “some assembly required” without informing people that their products are not edited and are self published. Then you have those that try to split up their books into a few chapters and try to sell it in parts. This is is no less an incomplete book that they try to milk for every penny. People forget why these e-books were once cheap and slowly accepting less quality, less story, for more money.

[@zakofrx]

Their are lots of common books were the paper backs are cheaper than the eBook..

[@Marianrest]

Funny thing is that a lot of ebooks are starting to become more expensive than physical books now too

[@hexi9595]

And a lot of Phisical books are now just printed versions of the E-book. Specifically school books, they aren’t even hiding it.

[@nobodyshome6792]

EBooks by Anne McCaffery start around 15 bucks each. My wife just bought me a hardback box set of her complete bibliography for 10. Still factory sealed, from a local used bookstore. Make sense of that.

[@sostrongineedmoreofyourmon974]

I feel this take. Recently I was furious when I paid for an e-book from one of my favorite authors ($14.99 which was bad enough to accept) and I found myself done with it in 2 hours and the entire story took place in less than a day of story time and the protagonist basically simply found out the name of the antagonist. The next book was advertised in the closing message as being released 6 months later and I suddenly realized the author had simply cut the usual story in half to get paid twice for what would normally be one book. I harshly reviewed the book (for its lack of effort, devolving storytelling, and the clear intent to deceive and defraud the consumer/audience) and decided I would simply not buy any further books by the author. This was the 24th book in a continuing story following one character. I’ve spent almost 2 decades reading and following these books.

[@ShredderMediaRetro]

Depending on condition/completeness but a a CIB copy of secret of mana can go for $150-300 depending on condition. Cartridge only about $35-60

[@banhammer3904]

Back in the early 90s, PC DOS games were the way to go. They didn't use an expensive ROM cartridge. They used cheap floppy disks. The games were generally $30-50 and you got extra SWAG in the gamebox.

[@LoveThisRealWoman]

Short answer: No. Long answer: Fuck no.

[@bubeable]

I would have totally paid 100 for RDR2. The game was massive so why charge the same as for a game half that size

[@dreadequation7320]

@@bubeable I like how you 👍 liked your own comment there genius.

[@dream6562]

Realistic answer: you'll pay what you're willing to

[@FinnIstGut]

@@dreadequation7320 I like how you 👍 liked your own comment there genius.

[@Piant_Genis]

Lol, imagine liking _your own_ comments.

[@DNDaMD]

I will never pay 70 bucks for a game. Wait a year, get it 30-50 percent off, a years worth of patches and fixes. It's a no brainer

[@zach_zach5898]

Some games have amazing launch experiences though. Like I paid full price for Monster Hunter World and it was totally worth it. IMO not pre-ordering is a no-brainer. For most games I pay 2-10€ though.

[@kalle-malle]

fomo, you gotta play "the new thing" when it comes out or you're a loser

[@cyberrunner6529]

​@@kalle-mallesays who

[@kalle-malle]

@@cyberrunner6529 Fear of missing out

[@Just_a_Piano_]

@@kalle-malle again, says who? The only people who'd say that are the losers themselves spending daddy's oil money

[@Diamond_Hammer]

The higher priced "deluxe" editions I will only buy if I feel the "extras" are worth it for me (including special edition boxes with limited merch), or if they include access to DLC's down the line, which they usually price in the end being more expensive if you get the base game and then those DLC's separate.

[@ROCKFISHGames]

Little correction: All Steam key resellers like Humble Bundle also take a 30% cut! The only way to avoid the cut is selling keys directly through your own online shop which won't move the needle because typically you simply don't get enough traffic to your own store. Also, total adressable market or audience plays a huge role on pricing. If the market is a rather niche but the game is expensive to make, like a high-end space combat game for instance, the price has to be higher than average. Furthermore, because 100x more games are now featured in any seasonal Steam sale than five years ago, the base price has to be higher, so through gradually more aggressive discounting over a longer time period, typically 5+ years, the full range of price elasticity can be served through wishlits, aka anyone buying when the price is right for them personally. Lastly, because game discoverability is the biggest issue especially for smaller devs, upselling through meaningful DLC (expansions, supporter packs, artbooks, OSTs etc.) is vital. /Michael

[@Zetherior]

Vampire Survivors was a $3 game based on the amount of content.. the amount of content has more than doubled since then.. so i think $5 is justified.

[@Rev0cl0ud]

This game is one of those cases where I buy the dlc every time.

[@Frigobar_Ranamelonico]

​@@Rev0cl0udsame for Deep rock galactic

[@shangrilai1990]

Vampire Survivors WAS a $3 game. Games do updates and add more content all the time but don't increase the price. They added paid DLC and also changed the price of the base game higher. The base game, whether they added more content or not, should stay the same as the DLC is now covering more and more income. I bought the base game less than 2 years ago for AU$3.99 now the base game is AU$7.49 + AU$12.96 for 4 DLC minus the soundtrack. I know it is a good game but it went from a AU$4 game to a AU$20 game like that over 2 years and that is the problem, a total of a 5x increase in price to experience the whole game.

[@JoinedSouls]

destiny 2 is completely unapproachable because of all the dlc you have to buy

[@randomhappenings]

I enjoyed destiny 1. Earlier this year I thought eh maybe I'll get into destiny 2 then I saw the mountains of dlcs I would have to buy and noped out.

[@KnightlyRogue]

I stopped playing it years ago because it became a cash grab that doesn't care. The story for Final Shape was good, but if you started at the beginning of the game, and bought all of the DLCs, that is between $240-$350, depending on the editions. Now it would be almost $200 for everything, and now all the good stuff is locked behind a paywall called the Eververse store. The game used to make sense, now it is just a cash grab. And exotics don't mean anything. Don't get me started on that... 😂

[@mr.grandmaster1524]

Yeah destiny 2 is not very newcomer friendly since u have to spend like 300bucks to get any good content

[@ghostlyrazgriz5228]

They are making it slightly better but as a long time player. I would still only recommend in the weeks before an expansion. Before 'Final Shape' all the expansions were free for 3 weeks.

[@RandomWrongDeletion]

I tried it for a while and it was actually really fun but I quickly ran into the parts where it was begging me to pay more money for other stuff, then it got boring and I haven’t played since

[@BeachLookingGuy]

Maybe I’m just a complete idiot, but why are there no such thing as demos? The price of games is only a problem because we don’t know how we’re going to like the game and are given a tiny sliver of time before you can get refunded. Imagine if when buying a car, instead of given a test drive before buying, you have to buy first and then test drive it. But If you Drive it for more than two hours you can’t get a refund. Just make demos and this whole problem quite literally goes away completely

[@bravo_10]

Good point

[@moarjank]

These days I try to supplement that with KZbin, but it doesn't tell me if it runs on my hardware.

[@memegod731]

I understand the aspect of wanting to get paid for the extra work of making new stuff, but as a consumer, i fucking *DESPISE* it when games lock new content behind a paywall. instead of just making a new update and adding the shit to the game, they make it a dlc and make you spend more money on a game you already have. you want to be able to play the game and experience all it has to offer, and to be able to finish it, and experience the new things, but when you lock that new stuff behind a paywall instead of just updating the game? that shit pisses me off to no end. PLUS the argument doesnt work for non indie games, since their developers will just get paid for doing shit anyways, they arent gonna recieve money from the sales, they get paid by the company to do the work and thats it (usually). its just another way for greedy companies to squeeze more money out of the consumers.

[@highrider9168]

Thors a good guy, but hes making some enemies in the form of corporate overlords. 😂

[@DankHillCometh]

he will just hack them kappa

[@channingtaintum]

He's a man of the people, and the people will support him over the corporate overlords ten times out of ten.

[@FORZA_EDITS]

@@channingtaintum unless they release some propaganda defaming Thor's name through some hit piece thus removing his voice.

[@afreshreaction]

i dunno what he said but jesus that glasses tanline

[@Destide]

He has an army of ferrets he'll be ok

[@StevesTutorials]

As a developer myself. I cannot tell you how many times i've been told to spend my time on something I know players WILL NOT care about, or care very little about. I've seen people get put on tasks that took them 1-3 months on something I said from the start wouldn't work or couldn't be implemented due to it being too demanding. Such as real time water physics, Unreal engine Groom, over the top volumetric systems, ect.... I've seen months of work down the drain because when they then try to implement it they go "oh we're getting 10 fps. We can't actually use this". Like don't get me wrong. Some of the things are "cool" features that aren't demanding. However they are not priority, Some tasks would be like...stuff you'd do in a patch after the game is released. Not something you'd work on in the damn blocking out stage of the game. Yeah...game dev is harder. However it's made infinetly harder depending on who you're being lead by or woring for.

[@-KillaWatt-]

What is sad is I see this same sentiment from many devs in the industry all the time online. Especially those attached to large studios. They are constantly trying to strike a balance between what gamers want versus having the corporate side of the industry which wants to monetize everything they can while cutting corners and releasing games in unplayable states. I watched a dev podcast for the Bethesda team who worked on Oblivion and they all talked about deadlines and cut content due to corporate oversight and how it fundamentally changed the game far beyond what they envisioned. It was kinda depressing listening to them walk on eggshells explaining it as you know what they wanted to say but couldn't.

[@StevesTutorials]

@@-KillaWatt- it's like you said. It comes down to corporate trying to make dev decisions. They need to listen to devs but they won't.

[@-KillaWatt-]

@@StevesTutorials Maybe you could answer this but I don't know your level of dev work or expertise in the field but have you ever seen a group of devs coming to together to bypass the corporate side of the industry and just making the games people want? I know there are instances of this occurring. Like when Black Isle Studios' staff were laid off by Interplay and the devs left to create Obsidian Entertainment. I just wonder why this doesn't happen more often within the gaming industry. I get that most people don't have the capital to fund such ventures but nowadays it's more easier than ever to create games with all the tools available. I'm surprised there hasn't been an industry mutiny where devs come together to make the games people want. It's devs who make the games afterall. Without you and others we don't get games at all.

[@StevesTutorials]

@@-KillaWatt- I've only ever worked freelance or in a 8 man team at a small indie company. I guess we did come together at times to tell the boss he was wrong about things though. Not enough to make it work however.

[@DawnClark-wj9ix]

Oh my gosh, how awful that the people who know are ignored!

[@pizzlesauce]

Crazy because 90% of my games I rent from the library unless it's something I must have on release which happens once every 2 years. Everything else can be rented for free from my library.

[@huz7531]

I feel it's entirely dependent on the content of the game like how ppl where concerned with the 40$ price tag on the elden ring dlc but it was 100% worth it imo making the full game technically 100$. Cod back in the 2010's sold the base game for 60$ and 4 15$ dlcs so 120$ total ( when it was good ) and have some the best memories playing these games with buddies.

[@pvpherthen2981]

The problem with comparing what games cost in the 1990's to what games cost today is that even when you adjust for inflation, it doesn't take into account that wage growth hasn't matched inflation, and that rent and house prices have absolutely sky rocketed, taking up far more of the every day persons disposable income.

[@Graestra]

Exactly

[@andregoepfert2745]

Great point! Even if it might go over many people's heads 😅

[@georgeide2337]

I don’t know, here in Norway, wage growth has kept up with inflation quite well. Even minimal social security recipients can afford most games without issues, and they live off $30,000 a year after taxes. There is no real excuse for hating on the price increase of games, other than anything beyond the purchase price (microtransactions, DLC costing the same as the base game, etc.). I would add that we, as consumers, set the price. Supply and demand work that way; we get what we are willing to pay for.

[@altonb.1396]

​@@georgeide2337This might be news for you but the rest of the world ain't Norway. Here in the US specifically even with a decent job we don't make enough to compete with inflation.

[@EmperorDxD]

That not really the devs problem

[@YoYoK3nny]

The Sims 4 was not originally free to play for the base game, but it's pretty obvious why they decided to make the base game free to play.

[@rengurenge]

Sims 4 base game is so bland there is almost nothing to do, will keep you busy for one day max if you have nothing better to do and then you will never want to touch it again. Everything needed to make it more enjoyable is in those DLCs but personally I tried it few times with all DLCs (thanks pirates) and I couldn't get same enjoyment I had with Sims 2 and 3.

[@Toerworth]

@@rengurenge​​⁠same, I played sims since TS1 and now I see all the additions and they don’t inspire me to even pirate them

[@munkydreads]

MTX baby that's how they get their money. Give them thing that should've been in game and call them Packs

[@forbiddenruin]

They CAN MTX TF out of 90% of the game and price lock people out of Modding.

[@traiforse5777]

Making it free after countless purchase of the base game without compensation to those who spent money on it. Let's not forget that Sims 4 improves on almost nothing from Sims 3 other than graphics. In fact, it cuts a lot of contents. And their Expansion Packs (most expensive DLC tier) are literally the same price as their base game. Their second tier DLCs are 50% base game. There is a DLC that requires another DLC. This is the most obvious scam. Those expansions would realistically go for 50% game price or lower. Making the base game free is a rugpull scam on the older players and a false justification for their DLCs when new players can't compare how absurd the DLCs are priced at. Modders can animate and create models with almost the same quality and you can donate $1 for appreciation. This shows any items and animations (Excluding new game mechanics and maps) from DLCs are just simple reworking pre-existing assets instead of additions. Which devalues the DLCs. All of them are half-assed compared to Sims 3. Vampires are standalone compared to Vampire/Mummy/Zombie/Fairy/Werewolf. University is nonexistent. Cats & Dogs are separate with horses compared to Sims 3 cats/dogs/horses/reptiles.

[@MrDizuki]

I strongly belive that if it wasn't for the indie revolution we would already see $100+ games. You will make less money selling games for $100 than you will selling the exact same game for $60. Most people will give it a pass and buy games like Minecraft where $25 gets you hundreds of of hours of entertainment with all the mods and community features that only exist because the game was cheap and accessible. I've personally lead to hundreds of game sales within my friend group, and 95% of those were games I didn't feel bad pressuring my friends to buy because of low barrier of entry. I got my friends into Vintage Story, because the game was so cheap I convinced at least 8 other people to buy it so we could run a server together. If the game was even $60 I probably wouldn't of bought it, but because the game was $18 I lead to over $144 in sales. The game was so cheap people in my group who didn't want to buy it for themselves got it bought for them. Cheap fun games are like an infection that spreads because a movie ticket is $20 so if I can get an evening of fun with my friends for less than $20 a person its a win. All this to say that AAA struggles to compete with that. I can't even remember the last time I paid full price for a AAA game. I don't buy them at release because they are broken, then by the time they go on sale I just don't care anymore because I'm distracted by some indie game I picked up for less than a bag of chips.

[@Tabby3456]

"50 dollars" "No, sorry. I said 60" "Yea yea... 50 dollars" "No, I said 60"

[@onam3000]

The problem with $70 games is there are tons of good games that are cheaper and thus most people buying $70 games don't feel like they get what they paid for.

[@locklear308]

Good/Bad games shouldn't really set the standard per se. Like, yeah if something is bad it is bad... but that doesn't mean that the higher price cannot be justified. For example, Red Dead 2 should have been $149.99 at launch. Why? Because $70 isn't shit now days. In from like 1995 to 2000, an average game was 49.99 (though sometimes more). In 2024 that is $93.01 from the year 2000. $49.99 in 1995 is $104.46 in 2024. In 2005, with the PS3/360, $59.99 which is $98.80 Then 2020 was when they went to $69.99 which is $85.21 So, the reality is that we are all getting WAY MORE GAME for our money since the 90s. So the issue truly is that games are entirely too cheap. Now I will say that different size/type games should have different prices... but the issue still stands that $69.99 for a video game is entirely too cheap. So sure bad devs can exist, but good ones basically are getting screwed doing more work for less money

[@ferinzz]

You say that, but ubisoft is making millions off of their paid mod portal.

[@feelinsky3337]

@@locklear308 You're talking like a corpo psyop my guy. You don't make a cent off those sales, why are you advocating for price gouging the consumer? And don't give me "the teams that made the game deserve the money" because they only get paid what the corp pays them, then all that extra money you want to give them is thrown in the wallet of the people on top. Wake up.

[@bravo_10]

Yea and I found that out quick with MW3, now I look at every review of games from channels not owned by the likes of IGN to really see if the game I was interested is even worth picking up. I was looking forward to the campaign on MW3 but before I bought the game saw reviews of it and how they completely killed the story. Only got the game (at a discount) because my good friend wanted to play multi-player. I hate modern gaming.

[@DarthSpock9940]

As a Destiny 2 player that joke was 100% accurate. How tf am I supposed to convince someone who hasn’t played the series to spend 150+ on the game

[@JohnHurt-ym5jq]

you couldn't convince me to play destiny 2 even if you had me at gunpoint tbh.

[@Astroqualia]

​@JohnHurt-ym5jq the game is fun. Paying for the entire game is not fun, as it was obviously designed to be a literal giant microtransaction with grinding on top of it.

[@user-rr6zc6dy1o]

because you wouldn't need to convince me i wouldn't even pay $100 let alone $150 thats insanity and stupid

[@toolittletoolate]

I stopped playing Destiny 1 after me and the boys collectively spent 100 bucks on it for copies and DLCs You'd think I'd have learn my lesson but I stopped D2 after spending 100 personally. Can't wait for D3 to give them another 100 bucks You don't feel it the same when you're enjoying yourself and it's just 20 bucks every 2-3 months. Getting funny emotes and grinding out meta loot. I hate pvp more then anything but the game was engaging enough to get me to do Crucible. Even rarely Gambit. It's a weird situation to be hating something and enjoying it at the same time.

[@forgettd]

I've got a friend playing d2, and I purchased everything up to lightfall for $47, and that was good co-op fun. I will get the last shape soon, too

[@TreesTwisted]

I feel like there's a difference between a $160 game that gives you more value than a $70 game that gives you the same value as a $60 game. So while value is definitely an issue, i think games costing more than $60 with no added value is still an issue as well

[@helloraptor]

'Popular voice actors don't matter.' Strongly disagree. The number of people I know who were originally pulled into Destiny because of Nathan Fillion as Cayde-6, Lance Reddick as Zavala, and Gina Torres as Ikora is pretty staggering. Those voice actors made the commercials for that game more than any of the action they showed, and continued to nail their roles for years in a way that their replacements have never quite managed.

[@user-dw5ns8ul3k]

" 'Popular voice actors don't matter.' Strongly disagree. ". The thing is, Destiny is made by a top tier famous developer with a huge publishing company that required game sold AT LEAST millions of copies. In this case big name is necessary. But 90% of developers targeted toward "core gamers" and they need to sale maybe 100~200 thousands of copies to make money. For them, have celebrity on voice acting won't make their game sale number spike to millions, and it will cost too much. Popular voice actors only matters when you game required mass marketing appeal, even though it may not that decisive.

[@romkin1197]

The worst thing about Sims 4 is...all the "DLC" are just repeats from previous games. literally nothing new is added.

[@rcslyman8929]

Oh, that's not even the worst part, honestly. Because that's just the Sims in general, the only true revolutionary thing that was ever added was TS3's open world, and they rolled that back because of engine limitations. No, the worst part... like a third of that is the damned Kits. Which is just official-released cosmetic mods. They're selling mods. And it's not even good. Like, a bedroom set. A kitchen set. Some clothing styles. And I get why they're doing it specifically, to bilk the dirty console players that are unable to mod their version of the game at all (it's the reason Lovestruck's coming out, which is basically just an official repackaged version of WonderfulWhims, AKA WickedWhims Lite). There's been some... a couple good ones that I've gotten, but mostly they are shit, or at least not nearly as good as the creators you can find on modding sites.

[@KnownAsKenji]

Combinations of that, or little pieces and bits that aren't useful at all, or just straight-up weird stuff that doesn't mesh with the rest of the game and is never itself expanded upon, like the Star Wars crossover.

[@user85937]

It doesn't matter if they make games $100 or even $200, I'll simply not buy overpriced games.

[@moxiemaxie3543]

I believe they make it overpriced b/c ppl keep paying for micro transactions, ptw and fake clothes 😂

[@diegomireles]

Ubisoft games from 200usd ultimate editions to 30 or 40 bucks. Better not buying games when they are launched

[@axelfond8317]

I'll pay if the game is good and has around 40hours. The hours are worked out on flawless play and efficiency and the average person doesn't do this

[@Revenant-oq9ts]

Yar har, fiddle de dee

[@evaone4286]

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum 🚣‍♀️

[@redd1th]

I work for a huge gaming company. One thing to consider is that almost all games that are 70+ are games you play over a multiple months. There are very expensive server costs for each player each month. If you play 8 months, that initial $70 is being heavily cut into if you're not buying anything past that $70. The $70+ is to hedge against that and why so many companies now do live services and seasonal passes. It's to keep paying for server costs and to subsidize free players. After that, it's all greed, lots and lots of greed, but it's not entirely just to make money. There's costs that didn't exist back in the 70s.

[@michaelmurray6197]

The crazy thing is that these companies are screwing up when they overprice a game. It reminds me of when mobile games were first coming out. Temple Run hired a consultant and asked them how they could make more money for their game. They were selling it for something like $4.99. The consultant looked at it and then told them that they should be selling it for $0.99 instead. At first they were shocked because they were losing $4 on every sale, but eventually they decided to try it out. The game blew up almost immediately and they sold so many more copies that they ended up making way way more money. How many games have been released in the last few years that would have made way way more money if they would have been priced cheaper? Sure Palworld and Helldivers 2 did alright and probably won't have sold way more copies, but they were also priced at $29.99 and I believe $39.99 along with I think some 10% off sales or something when they first released. Now compare that to something like Dragon's Dogma 2 which was priced at $69.99. How many more games would they sell if they were priced at $29.99 or even $19.99. It doesn't cost them anything extra because it's all digital. They have only sold something like 2.5 million copies, I'd imagine that reducing prices to something like a third could easily multiple sales by way more than 3 times. The truth is that for most games people are far more price sensitive than these companies think. All you have to do is think about whether your sales would more than double if you halved your price. If it does then why aren't you reducing your price? Sure there is a minimum where prices are so low that basically everyone that wants it has already bought it, but I think that is well below $29.99 right now, maybe even down at $9.99.

[@stevenmilot3633]

Well, who's paying 160$ every year for a wow sub?

[@nguyenduchuy52]

I mean... It was atleast 1 years... Paying 100$ game nowaday have like 10 hour of gameplay and 40 hour of bs mechanic... By that it was only better if you only played like 8 hour per month on wow

[@prostokeereell1286]

@@nguyenduchuy52 you paid those after you "bought" the game with all of its expansions

[@dylan4125]

Servers costs aren't cheep

[@cband8030]

It’s funny how people have been paying for the same content for 20 years.

[@dion3727]

well that's different your paying 160 + expansion for a game you like vs your paying 70-130$ for a game you might not even play more than a few hours because you don't like it, there has been a few games i bought for full price i thought i'd like and got 5 hours in and said eh im bored

[@shatterfall_hunted8236]

I would argue that people who are on the internet are over-informed to the point were a lot of stuff that is unknown to the majority of the world we consider basic knowledge. The average person who says "am a gamer" has no interaction with anything other than a controller and their console , if prices increase they think its the retailer , if controversy happens and something changes they had no hand in it and they wont know after. The AAA game industry relies on uninformed people who see a familiar title and a cool cover art because they are the majority and funny thing is that because of their lack of knowledge they consider even the most dogshit game to be fun because they have no point of contrast , they see a cool cinematic and realistic grass and thats enough for them.

[@-Timur1214]

In german you could call those people "Nutzmenschen" what basically means "cattle people". Humans who are like cattle, just there to power the economy but without any critical/self thinking but in such a majority that companies priorize on them rather than on what we would call "real gamers" but sadly those don't mean the majority of income for AAA-games or general stuff

[@EKensai]

For sure there is definitely 💯 those mindless people plus folk who have no limits with money like the average Joe they can just spend 2k on a shit game and it's like buying a pizza not a concern but to a developer they go oh look we make sales 😂

[@Eins3467]

Tbf saying a game is s*** is still subjective. Some people just enjoy things differently. It's just bad when they are falling for predatory practices such as microtransactions on a paid game and end up supporting other similar stuff just because they think it's the standard.

[@Padlock_Steve]

problem is that the cover arts suck ass

[@None38389]

As a game dev myself I would say that a lot of people are over-misinformed instead of over-informed, they saw the tip of the iceberg and then make wild assumptions of what's going on underneath and then spread it as the truth. Asmon isn't blameless in this either.

[@GlassHalfEmpty66plus6]

Stellaris is a great example of this barrier to entry due to DLC situation. The base game is cheap but you have to spend $175 to buy all of the DLC, otherwise you can’t play multiplayer or with friends who have DLC’s. It’s a great game but dropping over 200 to enjoy all of the content is absurd.

[@jmh1189]

You have to take into account how much smaller the market was and how new the tech was. We paid over 2000 in the early nineties for a windows 95 packard bell computer. That was during a time when most households didnt have any form of pc. Supply and demand. Also, cartridges were generally much more difficult to program for and produce compared to compact disc. Now there are no discs. No shipping costs. And a huge market. It costs them next to nothing to market to them all other than paying third party fees like steam, sony and xbox market place. Theyre essentially just paying for server room and distribution. The issue is the fact that game quality is going down amongst triple a studious and prices are going up on top of the anti consumer practices like loot boxes and battle passes. Mid 2000's i paid at most 15 a month a mmo sub for star wars galaxies. Expansion pacts added a substial amount of content to games rather than 2 hours of extra gameplay for a couple missions. Now kids are spending thousands of dollars of their parents money on single games. Adults(particularly streamers) spend tens of thousands. There is no defense of them charging 100 for a game nowadays that contains microtransactions that block part of the game through a paywall. No microtransactions = id gladly pay 150 bucks for a game. But thats not the case. More money shittier games.

[@SpicyMatti]

69,95€ for a cartridge game that was "FINISHED" and not buggy, that took extremely hard effort. now some greedy companies ask the same shit for a digital game, weirdly enough its not cheaper than the retail version of it.

[@DinoNuggets723]

bruh they were buggy as fuck lmao

[@joaoteixeira8349]

@@DinoNuggets723 yep. bugged games on release is as old as gaming itself

[@oldlifeorig5028]

Yeah of course, games today aren't that complicated as cartridge BS back then xD

[@tarrantwalter524]

did you even play games back then? they were buggy as fuck and the developer of the game had no expectations to fix it or release patches whatsoever (because practically that wasn't a thing). once the game shipped, they were done and moved onto the next game and whatever you got was whatever you got.

[@bradkirchhoff5703]

Games werent $69.99 until a few years ago. Im 38 and remember vividly how pricing was. $49.99 in the early 90s. $55.99 in the later 90s. $59.99 in the early 2000s. Now its $69.99

[@jadams2289]

The fact expensive versions outsell normal versions is misleading because the presentation itself skews the market. It's a psychological trick. If you're going to buy assassins creed, you probably like the franchise, you're committed to spending time on it, and you want the most out of your experience. The real question is how many potential buyers did you lose trying to get $30 extra?

[@MikaeruDaiTenshi]

Not to mention, people don't buy the expensiver version just to support the developer, or because they think they game is actually worth it, but simply to get EVERYTHING, as most of these expensiver versions include a seaon-pass (mostly at a reduced price) some DLC-Items and other things. So they people simply fear to miss-out, or are collected (even if it's just digital artbooks, OSTs etc) These things should also be considered.

[@proxy8950]

I only buy the more expensive option if there's an actual content dlc like odyssey etc, just wait a month or so and get the discounts shi worth for the amount of hours and content

[@MikaeruDaiTenshi]

@@proxy8950 In general a good idea, problem always comes with the pre-order content shit.

[@N3G4T3]

The biggest concern these days is you're missing a large portion of content if you don't get the "deluxe" editions.

[@Noobgamer0325]

I personally haven't purchased an assassin's creed game since Black Flag because of everything they keep trying to pull

[@CptnKraken]

3:24 is the most accurate depiction of the game market I've ever heard 🤣

[@blondiwithstyle]

The biggest differences between a digital and a physical product is: 1. You don't truly "own" a digital copy. 2. In most cases, digital copies have no re-sale value and in rare cases, the ones that do are very difficult to sell. Some physical copies can re-sell for the same value, or even more, after a few years from release. A lot of the copies can also sell for at least half the retail price.

[@mhchx3]

I would rather be in 1993 economy and pay my games 150$ than be in todays economy and pay my games 70$ In 1993 I would own a house, today I can't even rent an appartment

[@jon4715]

Realest comment here.

[@frogthought]

Look up early 90s recession

[@self.improved]

Oh you mean the reason for the gulf war?

[@DOITWITHDAN]

Gaming from a AAA perspective is dead. Nothing has come out lately that has been remotely close to as good as some of the b list games that have been popping up left and right. I love that the internet is supporting indie gaming now more than ever because AAA studios keep fucking up their main titles. Maybe we'll see a trend in game prices lowering in the next 5 years. Or maybe not...

[@yeid44]

Elden ring?

[@justyouraveragebro5421]

​@@yeid44 Fromsoftware games like Elden Ring are the exception Other than them i guess Rockstar and CD projekt red are the only devs that still care about the players

[@Jay-mx5ky]

​@justyouraveragebro5421 honestly just bias, CD Projekt released a game that was broken on all platforms, but the most broken on the platforms they first promised it would be released on. The only reason cyberpunk is now a good as it is is because they were forced to refund people and had to fix everything wrong with the game and deliver on their promise of a playable experience to fix their reputation.

[@travisv6408]

Same, I havent bought a triple a game since south park fbw. Indy studios or retro games are where I find the value is. So many good games from the past 30 years with more value and fun than anything I seen in the last 5 years.

[@Dylan-fu6rz]

@@usernamehere5812 does rockstar, not add enough value to the single player experience to their games for you

[@Shiirow]

hate to break it to you but we had 100 dollar games in the past, I remember seeing several Sega games back in the late 80s early 90s that were close to or over 100 dollars. mostly they were role playing games. Phantasy Star 4 was roughly $85 but it was a complete package with no DLC or additional fixes.

[@chicomanara]

I met a guy who played the infamous Star Wars game that made the lootbox discussion break the game bubble. He loved it. He loved that he would buy all these awesome characters and how skilled players could take Luke in a 1 vs 50 and win. Those dudes that pay premium exist.

[@hyaku_my_shiki]

It's like nobody realizes that you can just stop buying games. Just stop buying them and the prices will come down. You don't have to play everything that comes out.

[@gggamer3851]

No. Stop buying and the price will skyrocket. Stock holders require never ending yearly profit growth. In order to generate never ending growth, games will cost $200. Kinda like how amazon raises it.cost every year. I bet $100 that Amazon prime is gonna be $200 a year in 2025. Facebook is investing in infrastructure over seas to create more customers to increase their profits in data harvesting.

[@onepunchman6165]

​@@gggamer3851 Nah, I would pirate.

[@onepunchman6165]

​@@gggamer3851 I bought the most expensive version of both elsen ring and the dlc because it was worth it and I wanted to support the developers. If the game is worth it, Buy it. If not, Don't buy it. And discourage others from buying it.

[@perfectiondreamusa]

@@gggamer3851insanely braindead take, take an economics class. literally google “what happens to price when demand goes down and supply stays the same?” you are dead wrong.

[@anap1680]

​@@gggamer3851kinda weird how games that fail out the gate go on massive discounts then

[@chrish2423]

These companies keep posting record profits and next quarter they need to beat that number. That is why everything keeps getting more expensive

[@apersonontheinternet8006]

Now adjust those record profits for inflation.

[@spectralassassin6030]

All to please investors. I want to meet these investors who care about only money. I just want to meet some of them. I just need to see them with my own eyes.

[@tami3456]

I will never understand how digital games can be priced the same as their physical counterparts.. most ps5 games in CAD are $93 regardless if it's digital/physical

[@Project_Future]

I finally learned my lesson with HD2. They were happy to charge people $40 for a game they KNEW WAS BROKEN and borderline unplayable. They kept selling it in an absolutly broken state, adjusted the weapons so that the only good ones were behind a paywall, planned on taking away access to the game from people in 188 countries but were ok taking the money first and even now, after MONTHS post launch, the game that everyone loved and had the back of is still crashing every other match, assests wont load (purple "?" everywhere). Modern gaming is just in such a sad state.

[@akakakases8660]

To be fair on the "188 countries" point- That is Sony's fault. The rest, though... From what I heard, the original vision was that Helldivers were gonna be like Starship Troopers. Essentially cannon fodder with increasingly crappy weapons, and only relatively recently have they changed the view from cannon fodder to elite super soldiers. On one hand, that can be a funny idea, on the other, as a DM (considering Joel is the GM in this case), that is not a good idea for a whole community. It's a good idea if discussed with a small community at best, but a large one like HD2s is it's a shit idea. the other stuff though, no excuse imo-

[@LegendaryDrops]

Year over year games provide less value to the player and ask for money money. Phil Spencer forecasted "less players in the future", and I think its because the silent majority is starting to wake up to these issues. Not from watching videos, but because they've noticed their games are starting to suck.

[@turtlefrog-tn3ek]

Another reason why expensive games 50 years ago dont compare to to day is that todays gaming market is multitudes larger and economy of scale comes to play negating inflation several times over.

[@turtlefrog-tn3ek]

@Entername-gr8fs yep ocmputers and the tools available are much cheaper and more accessible today to. back then a computer could easily cost 2000.

[@mikevignola4213]

​@turtlefrog-tn3ek to be fair up until about 20 years ago, there was no difference between a pc and a gaming pc. Once video games started putting the processing burden on the GPU, a regular general use pc ceased to be feasible to play most current games.

[@RE_NIC]

I have some old games in their original box, sometimes with the pricetag still in them. For example: Nintendo 64 F-1 World Grand PRIX 99,99 DM SNES AI Unser Jr.'s Road to the Top 149,95 DM SNES PGA Tour Golf 139,95 DM

[@mixedupgirl]

The problem i have with game pricing is that that goes up, with inflation or whatever. But generally our wages dont...

[@vokuhila6913]

then you have to spend an extra $60 on top of the base game since every company nowadays use dlc as an excuse not to release a full game

[@NoblinGoblin]

Remember guys, Thor isnt suicidal.

[@glados4765]

He hasnt said anything bad about Boeing though?

[@hawkthemans]

@@dtyj2815How does a person grow up to think things like this and not immediately realize how ridiculous they sound

[@michael_krueger]

@@dtyj2815 lmao bass booster. Now that's next level tin foil loool

[@gleipnirrr]

​@@dtyj2815 you do realise people can talk in different voices based on how they feel and the context. i can easily heighten and soften my voice's bass. stop being a terminally online weirdo

[@jon4715]

@@dtyj2815I watch both of them…

[@_Trainerlord]

One thing with the devlopment cost is unless your building an engine for scratch development is much easier that before as we have plenty of game engines to pick from that way we can get straight into the game design. Along with we have high level programming languages compared when they had to use assembly

[@stevelucky7579]

The main thing “I don’t like/ I am concerned about”, is that they will give you part of a game, then sell the rest to you a piece at a time. Which would be fine, if we still had completed physical copies for sale. Like if 200 years from now society will look back and see non finished immensely buggy games, or they will see finished completed largely unbuggy games that even our descendants will be able to enjoy and think about their ancestors sharing in this activity. Like a classic book. If your great great grandfather, your great grandfather, your grandfather, and your father all read and loved that book, it’s gotta be something special. But if you receive it and only a third of the book is filled with pages (because the rest were torn out), spelling and grammar mistakes are all over the place, there is clanky dialogue and you receive second hand embarrassment constantly from what little you can make out because the characters keep bringing up how oppressed they are… despite living the same life as you are 100+ years into the future. That sounds like a terrible book, and a terrible legacy to leave behind. Why not just throw it away or burn it at that point?

[@hano5277]

$100+ deluxe edition games that dont come with any type of physical merch or media like it use to is just crazy. Paying $30 more for a early in-game weapon, horse skin, side quest, digital sound track, and wallpaper is wild. Shit could have been in the game as unlockable content for completing challenges like it use to be. The deluxe edition stuff used to be physical merch like a metal hard case, a poster, a cd soundtrack, playing cards, a physical game guide, etc. Even that was garbage but it was truly optional It didn't affect the main game.

[@yoremothra9838]

I stopped buying "deluxe editions because of that. So sad how many people just eat it up

[@hano5277]

@@yoremothra9838 the last deluxe edition I ever bought was Fable 3 and it came with a book case coin and a deck of playing cards and I thought this is lame, the last game I went to a midnight release for was GTA v... I'm 32

[@lynco3296]

To be honest, I could care less about the physical merch. Why people are willing to pay so much more for trash they can hold in their hands, but balk at the prospect of paying more for digital goods is beyond me.

[@AkaiKnight]

They usually specify “digital” deluxe edition

[@hano5277]

@@lynco3296 Don't get me wrong I'm not saying the way deluxe editions were handled back in the day were good It just happened to actually be optional. It had nothing to do with the main game.

[@RoseMilez]

Not selling a game in a certain region IS setting the price to $0.. because the only way to get it is to pirate it. It means that every player in that region paid $0 for it. And the devs got 0$ from those players.

[@TORONTOKYO]

exactly. .

[@KeiTruck_JDM]

Stop it 😂😂😂

[@rincewindthewizzard6594]

Yep. If they don't want my money, i won't bother trying switch acc to other region. I will just use torrents or just ignore that game.

[@forbiddenruin]

The developers can blame Sony Publishing for that one, 174 regions still cant buy Helldivers 2 and Ghosts of Tsushima because they cant make a PSN account. And theres more Coming Soon. Recently Microsoft stated that "if its uploaded to the internet its "freeware"" or something like that, so anything put out by Microsoft is Free, by their own admission, including Microsoft/Bethesda's Paid Mods. Pirate away, they admitted that without knowing it that anything they put out is free.

[@agiant5715]

Im my home country because political issues, most methods of customer online purchasing (excluding stuff like bank wire transfer for big sums like for merchants) was banned. Thats includes paypal/visa/mastercard. So even though I was born in a well off family lucky enough, I couldn't play most games without pirating them. I even remember once emailing Mojan's CS asking if they know a way I can legally publish a a minecraft account and their best advice was to have someone else overseas buy it for me.

[@titusg4247]

I remember when i could buy 4 second hand games for £20 at GAME in town. Those were the days. Could get any PS2 game for £5 each, and even though the selection was random, all sorts could be found, even new releases.

[@MikaeruDaiTenshi]

In terms of "make it affordable in each region" This is a good strategy which will probably make your games not only affordable and be amount of sold products rise, your company also gets better known, and people will most likely invest more in the future. I'd say look for the average and minimum income, take the mediate from that, and compare it to the average costs of living. Then you take a portion of that to figure out how much you can buy your product for.

[@claudiosalvatico58]

The difference is that before the games were physical, the production and distribution of these were much more expensive, only a small part was considered "profit", in addition to the distribution/manufacturing/production. Nowadays everything is digital, the cost of that is reduced enormously, although of course inflation has an influence, but.... The production costs are not even close, it is becoming less and less expensive, so much so that an individual can produce many of them.

[@callak_9974]

The production costs seem to be all into making the games now more than anything else. They used to make a game with a team the size of what, between 30-50 people in the span of a few years. Now there's games that take 200+ people to make and development times of 7+ years....

[@Tritriumchannel]

Back in the bad old days, which is that period, you were reliant on publishers as it was simply financially and physically impossible to set all that up for distribution. On top of that, retail shelve space cost you & retail markup cost you as well as your price needed to be competitive with games in your league. Overall, as a developer, you were looking at getting roughly 15-30% of the actual sale price in the store. Everything else went to your publisher who, if u had a decent one at least, did everything after u finished the game & "took" around 70-80%, not really since all the other costs involved but you the point. And thats what the steam hating crowd/pro epic games crowd promotes, they clearly dont know it themselves, but that is what they will get. A fragmentation of the gaming audience, with the big publishers with storefronts controlling segments of the gaming audience. Isolated, not knowing what else is out there. Because that part is true, its very hard to get people away from steam to look somewhere else. Fragmenting the audience into a whole bunch of different storefronts all trying to isolate you into their platform, will only make that worse. And most importantly: this is less of a problem for the players in question. Its primarily an issue for developers & independent developers in particular, because all these platforms want exclusivity (look at streaming platforms if u want a glimpse of the future if this manages to succeed). Where do you go as an indie dev? To platform X which primarily has audience Y? Or rather platform Z, which has audience A, or why not a bunch of different platforms and reach them all? Oh wait i cant, because in order to get on either one of these platforms i need to sign exclusivity and thus signing away my right to distribute as i see fit per default. I just dont understand how people that argue with this cannot see the blatantly obvious reality in front of them. This whole thing, this entire thing, is pushed by publishers, with as stated goal to "compete" with steam, putting control of everything back into their publishing hands. Any indy dev that values their independence who unironically thinks this is a good idea, its fucking nuts.

[@Justdont693]

Also purchasing power of the American dollar. Sure inflation. But wages have not caught up with inflation.

[@helmholtzthemulewatson4763]

@@callak_9974 Depends, if were talking 16-32 bit era it could be less then 10 people. If were talking late 90s, some games have over 100 names credited. Nintendo would of had over 200+ people staffed for development though they though they would of worked on 2 or 3 games at a time. But to put cost into this in perspective the original Metal Gear Solid had a 10M budget while the MGSV had a budget of 80M. Goldeye 2M

[@agamersinsanity]

It usually takes 3-5 years after the hiring is done depending on how big the game is.

[@SamNo27]

All bungie needs to do is bundle all previous dlc when the next one comes out so the options on the store are current dlc, all old dlc, silver bundle

[@Jokerwolf666]

They still can't justify the cost of games, in Canada it's $102 after tax for every single AAA. Sales are going to tank for those games because we're in an economic time that people can't actually afford to buy a new game every week or every other week now.

[@kfoxldg5651]

Hey Asmongold, you don't talk about the way IT SHOULD impact the price of a game. When you work in IT, you have to mutualize your work in libraries, softwares, SDK, ... . So if you don't add new heavy IT work to a new game, it should cost drastically less to create than the previous one (because you reuse your previous work, at least for the IT part). Because peoples don't know that, IT company can inflate prices when they should normally get lower. To bring it back to something related to youtube, imagine how much it will cost to create a video without video editing software compared to how much it cost today. Those software devided the price to create video by a fuc*** amount.

[@lmAIone]

As Canadians we have to pay $105 for the standard edition of games now, it’s outrageous and should be illegal.

[@shangrilai1990]

As Australians we are at $120-130 for PS5/XBS games on disc. That pricing started in the 360/PS3 times. Switch is around $100 per cart.

[@DS-ov2tc]

one thing almost everyone forgets is that games no longer suffer from devaluation, some games release 20 years ago are £30 (im F'in looking at you fable) and then you have companys that dont compact games so you buy everything as a collection everything included for £40 roughly, no company can truly justify prices anymore DLC on top on base game with MTX etc this is always one of the few reasons why im more than happy pirate games.

[@BlueCyberPhoenix]

Everything that Asmond stated regarding the price of development for a game (@ 1:19) would be applied to games in the 90s as well (minus the voice over), so the only thing that has changed is moving from physical distribution to a digital distribution, and for decades the gaming industry continued to charge $59.99 for digitally distributed games as if they were being shipped through a physical distribution.

[@hamaguitar]

No game should cost more than $60.00 anymore, no game deserve that price anymore, specially digital versions of a live service one.

[@michaelwolejszo6445]

Plus the fact that you don't actually own anything real when you buy it.

[@grandgibbon2071]

@@michaelwolejszo6445 You didn't own it back in the day either.

[@hamaguitar]

@@michaelwolejszo6445 true.

[@devildante9]

I would argue that stuff like Elden Ring or Monster Hunter deserve that price tag, considering the insane polish they have and that I can easily sink 300 hours in each and feel like I still haven't done everything in the game. In fact, people joke that in monster hunter 300 hours is the tutorial, and that the real game begins from there.

[@LeMajesticJames]

@@devildante9I remember MH4U cost was 40 bucks and it had content enough for like 1k hours minimum, its insane how Capcom managed to put that much effort on a 3DS game, yet we have games like CoD or NBA that are literally a copy paste with 70 dollar mark

[@adinisbeast1870]

$100 is too much. END OF STORY. Espeically for the quality of games we are getting lately... NO FUCKING WAY.

[@chiquita683]

There are too many great games that sell under $20 to ever buy a $60 game

[@Lexgamer]

Bullshit. I'm sorry, but I'm so sick of people complaining about the price of video games. I just bought a new Blood Bowl team, it was $70, now I gotta build, paint, and find people to play with. I also own the video game adaptation of blood bowl, it cost $60 at launch, and had 12 teams, plus a stadium, pitches, balls, dice, etc, and the ability to find an opponent near instantly via online match making. And that's just one example. Dollar per hour, video gaming is the cheapest form of entertainment I can honestly think of. (Not including free activities like going for a walk, cuz, duh) Go golfing with my dad? $30 for a game. See a movie with my wife? $40 if we go at night and get popcorn. I'm sure you can come up with plenty of your own examples too. And these are just for an evening entertainment. Video games often take much more time. Even a "short" game you beat in 8 hours and are done with is under $10 an hour. Literal pennies if you play the game for 100+ hours. And this is too expensive for you? Are you so out of touch with any other hobbies that you just have no point of reference? Honestly I wish games had grown with inflation like other goods, but instead they've stayed the same price for ages, and introduced underhanded techniques for getting our money, ew... Again I'm sorry, but good lord...

[@elijahaitaok8624]

For 100 smackaroos it better have PS4 graphics with more hours of gameplay than Chrono Trigger

[@TheZeroSbr]

​@@elijahaitaok8624Chrono Trigger is a super short game though...

[@YueZhuang-pt6ff]

@@Lexgamer there are countless game that give the same and better entertainment than most $70 game the point is not the price but rather the quality increase are diminishing fast high price game often offer similar quality to a mid range player price game. On the point of game inflation grow should be like other game, no it is not playing golf is physical and requires and need courses, golf ball, etc it has a higher expense it make sense to have a higher price for the entertainment(btw on a quick note do normal people play golf anymore who said people think they aren’t overpriced) back in the days you can have a game manual ship to you, they even had ost music tape send to you that was a high price game back in the day, where is all of that now instead we get micro transactions, no higher game price won’t make them reduce the micro transaction in a game it will be the same big corpo are always greedy, most high end “4A” game is not 4A at all the game is commonly buggy and boring. The $130 was never worth its price much more like 30 is what I pay I will pay 130 if you give me a 130 game but most of us figure out that around $70 is where it’s not worth it price as the game is normally fallen behind on its quality, another thing is the cheap small indie game are often really good with its price it just make you feel like 70 usd game are stealing your money why can a small developer make a game with less the 10k as much fun as a AAA game that cost 10 and even hundreds of millions to make? Oh wait it’s because it has nothing to with fun it’s all about money. at least your happy with your game you bought happy for you.

[@lasarith2]

1:03 which I never understood with Nintendo shop on switch , the Physical version in shops were cheaper then there online versions, I’m sure someone will say server costs , but shops have costs as well .

[@xvkamui]

A lot of the times these games for $100 plus will include season passes and it’s hard to distinguish the worth in that before the game drops so nobody rlly knows if the money is fully worth it. Season pass could be 1 dlc or 5 on top of many other factors

[@e56hdyhdfgh]

WoW has a $70 expansion cost, a $15 sub fee, a game store, character service fees, on time access premium, collector editions, etc,...and IIRC they are trying for the yearly expansion release thing again. Very few other games have THAT much monetization. The fact they can still get away with a sub fee is laughable. They are like the pioneers of monetization, all the while having a completely mediocre at best product. I haven't played in years now, but it is so surreal seeing people, including a friend of mine, actually get excited for that game. In what world would anyone believe Blizzard is going to back any of that up with content, let alone quality? It's going to be watered down and people are going to be paying twice as much for nothing. In a perfect world, I'd pay ~$100+ (even yearly for QUALITY live service games) for games that EARNED that, as long as that's exactly where the monetization stopped. No stores, MTX, season passes, or service fees of any kind, etc. Nothing else. Probably the most bullshit thing in gaming now is the fact that people are buying the "promise" of content that they haven't even seen yet and has not even been made. Just imagine if the content had to sell itself...LOL.

[@forbiddenruin]

WoW cant do the yearly expansion crap, it takes them 6 months for their first major expansion update and another 6 months for their second or third raid and dungeon release, they repeat this for the 2 years after an expansions release. Its a terrible decision to release a new expansion while their last one is still incomplete.

[@emmanuelsampaio4687]

look into osrs, they did exactly this

[@cecilrhodes2153]

Check out Warframe

[@rpg5265]

@@emmanuelsampaio4687 dude the difference between OSRS is that yes they have monthly sub, but it's easy to farm currency in game to buy your monthly sub using the gold in game instead of paying real life money, that's the difference between the two

[@Workplaylister]

"Probably the most bullshit thing in gaming now is the fact that people are buying the "promise" of content that they haven't even seen yet and has not even been made. Just imagine if the content had to sell itself...LOL." I see this a lot with wow The War Within. People are already saying the game is fixed and that Blizzard made the game awesome... The expansion is not even out yet

[@nai3346]

I love how this guy made the same point many others have made, "video games were actually more expensive back then when adjusting for inflation", but he followed it up with the point everyone else conveniently leaves out (almost like they're lapdogs of the publishers), that the technology was different. A basic calculator in the 80s might have cost you more than $200 back then, but that doesn't mean selling the same thing today for half that price would be considered a good deal.

[@John-X]

i have a canadian friend on PSN & he tells me games are already 100 bucks there bcuz base price is $89 plus a 13% tax which comes up to about $101

[@cjjorge6636]

game's we'r fun/worth my $$$ back then ,,,, NOW we pay for b.s half done games ?? NO NOT ME !!!!!!!

[@devildante9]

@@John-X You are not going to like hearing how much game costs in south america then. Remember when the PS5 came out, it costed 2000 in brazil

[@PorchBandit]

Increasing the value proposition of the game is the most on point statement up to this point in the video. We remember games that were "cheaper" lasting longer 50-60 hrs, and now get $70 games that last 10-15 have a low amount of proposed replayability depending on the game (I'd single out Starfield on that one) and sometimes with only 8 or 9 hours of it being actually enjoyable. If you could guarantee me 90 hrs of original and unique gameplay (as in not repeated. Starfield 😠 looking at you) and it still had actual replayability, reasons to come back etc I'd buy it quick. Even the idea of providing the first year of dlc free for 40 bucks sounds alright. The issue now is that games like cod are 120 dollars for the upgraded version then they're providing paid dlc immediately. Making you still feel as though you paid double for half the content.

[@SIM_STA710N]

Back in the Xbox 360 era £60 would get you a statue of Marcus Phoenix with a Gears 3 deluxe disc case including a ton of top secret physical envelopes filled with literature , sow on patches, banners and a physical metal cog with a secret game code etched onto it, Happy times

[@ajthedemon40]

Jim the 60 year old Calculus Professor has no problem paying 150$ for assassins creed, he has like 5 hours a week of spare time to play it. Ryan the fastfood worker who can barely afford rent or living in his parents basement ain't gonna spend 70$ on no crappy ubisoft game. Ryan also spends more time on the internet to see the discourse around crappy videogames. Jim's time on the internet is looking up research on how certain cancer cells react to specific drugs and calculating their vibrations. Long story short Jim don't care that he is getting fisted by a company because Jim got bigger problems to deal with. Edit: I will never forget how mad I was when game companies introduced the concept and phase 2 season pass's. I used to by deluxe editions for games that came with the season pass that guaranteed me access to DLC's (Cod/borderlands 1&2) and now the season pass only gives you access up to the 2nd released DLC and then a new season pass ticket comes out.

[@atb8660]

Seriously though all Ryan needs to do is wait for price to drop I have seen old Assassins Creed games sell for $15.

[@bullymaguire1697]

Great analogy

[@Qb3nsis]

Many people forget but Raegan put a 100% tariff on Japanese electronics in 1987 that applies to SNES cartridge prices. I remember Toys-R-Us Games aisle with $70 games and it was largely because of Raegan kekw

[@GX-105D]

never happened, games never exceeded $50, maybe in cali, not in normal america

[@AbsentQuack]

@@GX-105D When I was 5 years old Super Mario 64 retailed for $60 my dad showed me the receipt and told me I better be grateful. It is a literal core memory. I lived on the east coast.

[@walkermott1750]

That uh, that ain't how tariffs work chief. If it were then tariffs would never be used rather than being the most common economic repair tool

[@Anonymous-mp2ln]

@@walkermott1750 Please tell us you are being sarcastic.

[@user-hj9xv4gp5e]

The typical model for selling triple A titles typically goes from 60 70 80 or 60 70 90. In all circumstances the prices plus accompanying advertisement are design to achieve a ‘priming effect’ as well as take advantage of other cognitive biases. They’re often specifically designed to subtly influence you into thinking that the middle price point is the best cost to reward, when in reality it’s most likely the cheapest option that’s best in this case. They primarily work because people who go to try and purchase the games have already accepted the initial 60 cost and are lead to believe purchasing the middle edition is a bargain. There’s so many ways they do this visually and along with many other biases they trigger that makes it so incredibly successfully despite the fact that most people on consideration see the flaws.

[@Adierit]

what i like is all these singleplayer games that need servers just to host an online skin store, you know you're paying for them to run those servers and now the game requires an internet connection JUST FOR A CASH SHOP

[@danielkelsosmith]

I will never and have never paid more than $40 for a game. Games are RIDICULOUSLY expensive, and it pisses me off even more when there are no demos. You’re paying for a product - that you cannot refund on consoles might I add - and you can’t try it. I will always wait for a sale on a game, or I will buy a product key, because in my opinion, if you are increasing the price of games to beyond a rational amount like $80+, you do not deserve to be protected from pirating and key sites. I love what steam does with their games. You get regional pricing, you can usually demo smaller titles and you can always refund your game. There is no protection for consumers on “AAA” gaming applications like Ubisoft connect. It’s bullshit, and these companies deserve every cent stollen from them through pirating and keys. Fuck these gaming studios. Protect indie games though.

[@jamiesadf5829]

Games costs stay down despite inflation because the cost to make a game is constantly dropping. Technology rapidly increased, games got prettier and more detailed, but also got easier to make. There are tons of already built, good and effective game engines. Most major companies have their handful of robust game engines. That's done. Every game after that on the same engine has its production cost dramatically decreased. The process is streamlined because its a good way to keep costs low and profits higher. You see a lot of companies (at least on the PR side) talking about how excited they are to use AI to speed up development. Its just the next step in this same streamlining process. Physical copies were the bulk of the price tag. It costs a lot to ship copies all over the world, to every store that will sell it. You gotta make a lot of copies, and thats a lot of money. But you don't need to do that anymore. Thats all gone. Every time they sell a copy of the game, it costs them NOTHING to do so. You can't even use the 30% cut on steam as an excuse, either. Its not really a cost. It still costs nothing, steam just splits the profits because its their servers and shit. But its not enough. not enough for the big wigs and the shareholders. But ultimately, the real problem are the people who buy every new game. You shouldn't. You shouldn't buy every single new iteration of CoD. You shouldn't buy whatever yearly sports game. You shouldn't partake in games as a service. Because its all just trying to condition you, to make the habit and break the resistance to the trend. As long as it keeps working, they'll keep doing it. The outcome is all that matters. Few major companies give a shit about player feedback.

[@devildante9]

It's crazy that something like silent hill 2 was made by a team of like 12 people (plus voice actors), while AAA games now require a team of like 200 people and they are ass.

[@ApexHydra007]

Ahould have seen DCS World on stream. Dude the DLCs are OUTRAGEOUS. Each individual plane is worth anywhere from 20 to 200 DOLLARS, its INSANITY.

[@LaBarata12]

The reason most folks are gonna buy the bigger version of a game is because if you get the lesser one it’s very visible where the holes are- You can SEE the spots where they ripped out content to sell as the ‘special edition’, and it’s on purpose- Half the time they have great big CONTENT LOCKED, UPGRADE TO DIGITAL DELUXE EDITION’ banners over them like caution tape over a broken elevator

[@Jobocan.]

Actually, fun thing about old games in the NES/SNES/N64 era is that there wasn't a "set" price for games. Secret of Mana was 69.95, but you could look at whatever crap came out around the same time and it varied. Games could come out for 20, 30, 40, 50, whatever. I don't know what determined that in all cases, but it did happen. The physicality of it mattered in different ways depending on the console (NES and SNES especially), because cartridges had different chips in them, so some games literally did cost more to manufacture compared to a disc or a download. If a game had a save feature, it also had to have a battery so it could hold that save (up until memory cards became a thing but at that point games were more often on discs than cartridges). On SNES there were some well-known chips like DA1 and the 2 Super FX chips, but there was a ton more. Some games had fully-custom chips, like Top Gear 3000 which was the only game with the DSP-4 chip. A game with no special chips would obviously cost less than a game with them because that's more manufacturing. The Sega Genesis only had one exception (Virtua Racing), and the N64 had a few examples in Japan (one game, Morita Shogi 64, had a fucking dial-up modem in the cartridge with a connector for I think your phone line on top (check it out it looks crazy)). Some Atari games had extra RAM on the cartridges (or Pitfall 2 which had a chip that helped allow for consistent music and some other programming stuff). And another thing with the physicality of it is that all games had large color-printed instruction manuals. Those included the story of the game a lot of the time (because sometimes there was no space in the cartridge for that), gameplay mechanic explanations, drawings and more (And stuff like dust covers, advertisement papers, subscriptions to Nintendo Power and such). Then yes of course there's the fact that all copies of the game need to sell physically which is no longer true, and the companies needed to have deals with stores to have shelf space, something they don't have to care about anymore obviously.

[@orionfell]

super nintendo games were always really expensive. most of the super nintendo games were 55-60 dollars when they first released, and a lot of them were in the 60-70 range. sometimes when a popular game was a couple years old theyd reprint it and sell it at a lower price, but no games were releasing at 20 or 30 dollars. even lazy arcade ports were 40.

[@TrykusMykus]

I think you forgot about the one thing that made physicality of the game worth way more - You complete the game and you can sell it or swap it around with your friends! It's not tied to 1 computer, 1 account or 1 profile. I don't know how people that are older than me can't remember that argument ever. There were literal game rent shops in my country where you had hundreds of games that you could rent for A FRACTION of the money - you play through the game in a couple of weeks, you pay a buck.

[@travisv6408]

Yeah I remember in the eighties and nineties when nintendo was good, and the prices in Canada were like 100 ish with tax. I think the most I paid was 116 for secret of mana from sam the record man.

[@StarContract]

Another problem with any price tag is that it assumes all games created equal which is 🤡

[@haroldcannon5359]

5:51 Can confirm that's how I view it. I don't want to go to work with the thought does me working a single shift or 3 shifts buy me a game; does the game I just bought live up to the hype or is it incomplete with pay walls?

[@corniche]

It costs more because it relies on availability : they can afford to make you pay as much as for a physical copy, because as soon as it becomes available, you can DL it and play it, unlike with a physical copy that requires you to go and buy it.

[@pc2555]

The question about a price of a product isn't really 'ok' or 'not ok'. It just is what it is and consumers will respond to it. If devs want to charge 120 dollars per game, a lot of people will stop buying them or maybe buy 1 or 2 games per year and no more. So unless they want lower sales and a poor reputation they will be forced to drop the price until its then 'ok' and more people will buy them again. Thats kind of how it works. The main problem we have now is that devs overcharge for certain games and people complain but then they buy it anyway and complain more online about how expensive they are. The only way a corporation will lower the price is if the product isn't selling. If they try raising prices and it sells, it will stay that way. Pokemon sword/shield was a perfect example. So many were complaining about them pre launch yet it ended up one of the best selling pokemon games of all time. So why would game freak put in more effort? Ironically they put a lot of effort, development and time into the black and white games and they sold poorly by comparison so if anything it taught them years ago making a better game doesn't mean more sales. I personally don't really have an issue paying $100 for a high quality game if its worth it as I've spent significantly more of my time playing and replaying high quality games than playing a bunch of quick, low quality ones. For example I've played the gba fire emblem games over 20 times each and gotten continual entertainment over them for 17 years. Some indie games I've bought I have over 400 hours of gameplay in and continued replaying them for 7+ years. Even though they weren't more expensive than others at the time, if they cost $80 instead I would buy them still. Having said that, for your average modern AAA game with bugs and other issues at launch sometimes not being fixed for a year plus content still being locked behind microtransactions like characters in fighting games on top of the huge initial price its not worth $100. Games with major DLC or in game purchases I would not pay over $60. It would have to be amazing to consider it. I was prepared to pay more than $60 if they decided to for the 1st final fantasy 7 remake because its one of my favorite games and been ages since the original.

[@J.B.1982]

I agree with all of that. This is a good summary. You have market dynamics and you have quality issues. Even the indie and AA space release games at 1.0 that need a year or two. Lol. It’s crazy. Don’t get me started on the *early access* shenanigans.

[@oratank]

why pay it full price when you knew it will get discount game need reason why people should pay it full price

[@pc2555]

@@oratank of course buying on discount is the best way to go for value but you can't always do that. You have to wait months to years after a game launches for a sale so if you want to experience a game when it's new with friends or the community you have to pay the full price. Steam and digital games are typically the games that go on discounts and certain titles (Nintendo games especially) never go on discount like Pokemon or super smash bros for example. In that case if you want it you have to pay full price.