Why can't people get it through their fucking thick ass skulls that even though inflation happened, games costing the same is not a problem for companies because their market is exponentially bigger than it was back in the day?! And it keeps growing!!
Every time I hear a fucking nintendo simp defending the price hike with "BuT gAMeS cOsT ThE sAme DeSpITe iNflAtIon" it makes my blood boil.
Why do these fucking companies need more money anyway? they already make enough SMFH
ひげ
@Gatitasecsii inflation + bigger games + bigger teams + bigger budgets = higher price.
i'm of the opinion that games need to be drastically scaled down and a lot of the industry needs to be cut with a focus on smaller, tighter experiences. that's kind of what indie games are for, though.
as far as nintendo goes, i guess we'll have to wait and see if $80 is really worth it for mario kart or not. it doesn't seem like they have shown that much of it. there could be another situation like tears of the kingdom where the depths weren't talked about at all, they were just in the game for players to find. personally, i know i will get $80 worth of mario kart world either way, just because i am a huge mario kart fan and will likely play it for hundreds of hours, but if other people don't think that then i guess we will see a change in direction.
i do know that with how many people already don't want to buy a lot of AAA games at $70 or even $60 (or in the case of something like concord, even $40), with tons of studios closing down because of it. things are going to be accelerating faster now with the game industry i think, if these companies are really going to try pushing for their shitty games to be $80 without a huge change to every facet of development.
@beardalaxy @Gatitasecsii
Why is it that in the game price calculus people ALWAYS seem to forget that games are much easier to make today.
There are more tools people can use, there are more experienced people that can help teach new devs, there is more documentation available, there are more pre-made libraries that you can reuse or take inspiration as a starting point for coding your game.
It used to be that every game release had to reinvent the wheel and write up a new game engine from scratch. Now everyone either uses the same of a handful of engines, or they gradually improve the engine they've already been working with for years. Just for the sake of the argument, imagine Valve makes HL3 in a Source 3 engine. Would they be writing Source 3 completely from scratch? No. There'd be large portions of it that just gets copy-pasted from Source 2.
Maybe you can make a decent argument that it's not easier to make models and texture them, but I'm not sure if even that is true. It used to be an art of it's own to make optimized models, that looked good while having the minimal amount of polygons. Now, if you're truly lazy, you make your model with as high of polygon count as you can, and get Unreal engine to "optimize" it for you.
Making games is much, much, easier. Expedition 33 proves that like nothing else before it probably.
Sure, the average AAA game studio is bloated with massive teams. But that's not because the games are hard to make. It's because studios kept hiring bad artists and devs that are barely able to accomplish a fraction of the work of a good developer.
We should not be rewarding incompetence. We should not be paying based on how many people worked on the game. We should be paying based on how much value the game provides in the end. And based on that, so much of the western AAA market DOES NOT DESERVE even $60, let alone $80.
@alyx @Gatitasecsii yeah i'm not even saying games are necessarily hard to make, they are pretty easy to make. however, it is still pretty hard to make something GOOD. if that makes sense. that's why the $200m these massive companies throw at a game will ensure that the game is easily made, but the small and dedicated team with a quarter of that budget will work a lot harder to make something much better. that's how it goes typically, at least.
game dev is a lot more homogenized now, and that leads to some problems too. but, it also isn't like every game a studio made even back in the day was using a brand new engine from scratch. bethesda is an extremely famous case of it being quite the opposite too. nintendo will often make an engine that targets their console and use it for pretty much everything. sega has always used the same engine for sonic for tons of other stuff (phantasy star online has always run on whatever the current iteration of the sonic engine is, for instance).
you're right, we should be paying based on how good the game is and not how many people worked on it. absolutely i agree with that statement. the problem is that the games do still need to get made, and if the quality isn't up to snuff then the studio gets axed and no more games from them are made. it is a problem that i think will fix itself and is already fixing itself. the only major studios left are going to be ones that can actually justify the larger price points. unless, that is, the game industry does have a "come to Jesus" moment and really scales things back.
@beardalaxy @Gatitasecsii
>the problem is that the games do still need to get made
Hard disagree on that one. There are already more good games out there than you'll be able to play for the rest of your life.
Even if you're obsessed with only playing new games, there's still about 90% more games than needed being made constantly.
The market deserves and drastically NEEDS a crash.
@alyx @Gatitasecsii yeah like the games need to get made so they'll keep pricing them as high as they need to for the games to continue being made until the games can't be made anymore and they either burn to the ground or they make serious concessions in order to keep making games, ir more lr ess what i meant