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.
@Gatitasecsii 200K sales has never been good for a game. at least, not since like the NES. maybe before then? go look at the sales figures for any notable game back then, they're waaaay higher than 200K.
@Gatitasecsii it's not good for a AAA game, perhaps even a AA game. indie games though, absolutely, 200K sales is pretty notable.
60 x 200 000 = 12 000 000
If that's not enough in the 1980's, I don't know what reality is anymore.
As for the modern day, I said games are getting millions of sales, the numbers are exorbitant now, even if the dollar is worth less.
@Gatitasecsii this is part of the equation though, because games are still selling millions of copies and not even breaking even. Alan Wake 2 had a budget of 70 million euros, and it wasn't able to break even. this is why games need to seriously scale down and offer tighter experiences, especially ones that are more replayable.
back in the 80s you had teams of like 10 dudes making mario 3. they were able to keep budgets a lot lower. a modern day example is expedition 33, which has a team of like 30 dudes and they were able to keep the budget a lot lower while still offering GOTY quality at a more affordable price. that's the key to "solving" the industry, imo. there is just way, way too much bloat.
there are also way more factors that go into it than just the game's budget and the sales themselves. there is the profit margin so they can keep making games, there are all the fees paid to various platforms and manufacturers that aren't included in the budget of the game, there's the cost of running the actual studio itself (rent/maintenance/etc).
in nintendo's case, i do actually think that a large part of it is them arbitrarily deciding that the game is better than the competition with much higher demand and so it can be priced more. it's greedy, for sure, but i can't exactly argue with that logic. especially when you take into account the whole thing about games not actually costing $60 technically for a long time now.
@Gatitasecsii if i keep typing like this i'm going to wear out my keys lol
thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!!!
Exceptions will forever be exceptions, but the counterparts to the games you mention sell waaaaaaaaaay more nowadays, like multiple millions to tens of millions.
I've had a lot of fun with some long/AAA titles (God of War Ragnarök, the original FF7, Red Dead 2, Far Cry 4/5) but there are also some I've dumped $60 for something hyped a lot that turned out to be shit (I couldn't get past 2 hours of Elden Ring without hating everything about it. Hogwarts Legacy is fucking awful. I beat Far Cry 6, but it was still dumb. Kingdom Hearts is totally overrated).
Longer, bigger open world games are getting more exhausting.
Nintendo is the worst. They're games are honestly not even that good. I've never made it through a Zelda game. I made it through a lot of Mario Galaxy back when I had a Wii and just gave up. Xenoblade I had great story and fuck awful gameplay. I don't see why people love Nintendo. Their games suck, their prices suck and their consoles are mediocre at best. The Switch doesn't allow you to backup your saves without a paid network account, and the PS5 also removed individual save backups (which the PS4 had!).
Yeah I mean, in my case there are some Nintendo games I do enjoy like Mario Kart, Smash and BotW, but they should definitely get a discount after a while, it's quite ridiculous for them to still be 60 after years of them coming out.
As for AAA vs Indie, I'm not a huge indie fanatic, but AAA could definitely take some notes from indie and focus more on gameplay than on fucking boring ass presentation most of the time...
@djsumdog @Gatitasecsii no game company is without their issues, but i personally do like nintendo games. i wish i didn't because then i could just drop them because of their shitty legal strategies. the only times i've bought games for $60+ in the last decade have been Nintendo games, though. other than like, doom 2016. they're games i know i'll pretty much always enjoy.
personally, i also get extremely tired of the bloat that basically every AAA game has at this point. the crazy focus on massive open worlds has really tanked my enthusiasm for a lot of games. i like nintendo though and i know i'll play a lot of mario kart even if i don't do the open world stuff so that's fine with me personally.
also, i've said this before, but basically no games are $60 anymore. not from anyone. they might say they're $60, but then they've got microtransactions, and special editions, and paid early access, etc. and that's before we even take into account live service games.
i made the comparison to FFXIV where if you want to play the game for a year you'll be paying $216 minimum ($60 for the game with all the expansions + $156-$180 subscription). yet, FFXIV is literally the biggest MMO. these are prices people have been paying for a long, long time.
Well for me it's never been hard to look elsewhere to be honest, there has never been a game I've been unable to resist beside maybe BotW.
Otherwise I'm content replaying my old games or looking at indie alternatives.
And yeah a lot of AAA studios waste a ton of resources on garbage nobody needs...
Finally, yes I agrre a lot of games now have hidden prices, but that's all the more reason we should push back...
@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
@beardalaxy
Yes, but just because the games are bigger and take more investment to develop doesn't mean they need to increase prices.
Games sell at incredible numbers nowadays, especially this decade when mediocre games have been selling millions during release week.
They really do NOT need the price increase at all, it's not like back in the day when selling 200k copies was considered a lot, nowadays games are selling that regardless or they would have to be atrociously bad not to.