Next-gen Games May Cost $70. It's Overdue, But Also Worrisome. (washingtonpost.com) 170
For years, it was long believed that $60 is the only price that the U.S. games market could bear (and they're often more expensive in international markets). But industry leaders and journalists have questioned the stubborn stickiness of the sticker price in recent years. And the last three years saw an explosion of varying price tiers, anywhere from free (like "Fortnite") to monthly subscription services, like Apple Arcade and Xbox Game Pass. And much of the industry's total game sales are digital downloads anyway. From a report: "The shift to $69.99 should have taken place in 2013, [in my opinion]," tweeted analyst Mat Piscatella of market research firm The NPD Group. "But folks thought mobile was a threat to the console business. ... Instead we got collector's, silver and gold editions [which offer additional content or perks] that elevate above $59.99 anyway." Big publishers like Activision, Ubisoft and EA all regularly release marked up "special editions" of games. These prices often only come with marginal bonuses (a skin or emote), but it's essentially charging people extra on nothing but a promise that more content is coming. EA's disastrous launch of "Anthem" in 2018 was a high-profile example of a game that charged a premium for promised content and barely delivered. Games haven't always been $60 though. Pricing in the 1990s usually depended on your local stores. Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games were anywhere from $40 to $100 a cartridge. It wasn't until 2005 that a retail price was unofficially standardized.
Much more than (Score:5, Insightful)
Its been more than $60 for some time now, ever since pay-for DLC was implemented. I'm not saying its a bad thing (I love extension DLC) but $70 was overshot long ago.
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Re:Much more than (Score:5, Interesting)
People say the high price is due to inflation, but there's more to it. I have lots of old games with price stickers still attached, and the cost of goods has not doubled in 20 years. Some differences I see:
- AAA obsession mindset, the game makers treat each game as a potential blockbuster, and so in Hollywood style they throw so much money into it. The problem being that the money goes to fluff like graphics, sound, and voice (including big name voice actors), while skimping on the budget for an acctual plot, game play, and fun. Again, just like Hollywood
- Digital only. I used to get games for discounts. Those nearly don't exist anymore. There are no shelves stocked with games that need to be sold or dumped to make way for new titles, and the bargain bins are gone. Now, before people object - I know about the Steam sales, I know about GOG sales. But the prices drop much more slowly now. It used to be I could wait a year and drop $20 or more off of a game price. Now it takes a few years before you start seeing reasonable discounts. To be fair, it is improving and is much better than it was a decade ago, but the problem of a zero cost warehouse and retail does affect price.
- A customer base used to throwing money away. Ie, kids using the parent's credit card, the sociel pressure to have the latest game on the first day so you can play with friends, etc. People buying pre-orders without knowing anything about a game, buying season passes for unknown content. It's like if I went down to Burger King and then discovered all the foodies got there first and the price exploded to cater to them.
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Oh forgot to add: Look at cost of a game versus the amount of typical game time it gives you. Some modern games are like movies; hand holding on-the-rails and done in a few short hours.
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Oh forgot to add: Look at cost of a game versus the amount of typical game time it gives you. Some modern games are like movies; hand holding on-the-rails and done in a few short hours.
For me, games are the most bang for the buck. I'll play a game for hundreds of hours. Games like Fallout, Borderlands, Skyrim, stuff like that. Sure they're not the most challenging games, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm not some youngster with fast-twitch reflexes. I like to take my time and slowly work my way through, with many many play-throughs. I can pick it up and play for five minutes or five hours. It's a tremendous value, especially those games with a strong modding community.
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People enjoy different kinds of challenges. In Skyrim, I have a bunch of mods that add realism. You don't want to go in cold water, you need to think about temperature, food, travel time, camping, etc. With drastically lower carry weights, perks balanced so you can't get "overpowered," etc. Waaay more fun. Yeah, I am like 80 hours in and barely halfway through the game. But it's fun to me to plan out my next adventure, provision, and take on the challenge.
And thanks to leaving saving alone (mostly) I can ho
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I hope they're pairing the price increase with demo versions. I'll drop $100 on a game I like but I have to have already played it for a few hours and decided I want more.
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Play time is not a metric I look for. If a game is $70 and lasts 1 hour, and that's the best hour in my life, then shut up and take my money. Don't make it longer and dilute the fun. The first Portal game only has about 4 hours of play time on a first playthrough and it was a massive success.
10 hours of play time has always been typical for story-driven, full priced games. From Lucas Arts point-and-clicks to survival horror games like Resident Evil, and it didn't stop them from being milestones in the histo
Re:Much more than (Score:5, Insightful)
- Digital only. I used to get games for discounts. Those nearly don't exist anymore. There are no shelves stocked with games that need to be sold or dumped to make way for new titles, and the bargain bins are gone. Now, before people object - I know about the Steam sales, I know about GOG sales. But the prices drop much more slowly now. It used to be I could wait a year and drop $20 or more off of a game price. Now it takes a few years before you start seeing reasonable discounts. To be fair, it is improving and is much better than it was a decade ago, but the problem of a zero cost warehouse and retail does affect price.
The upside to this is that if you stick to waiting for Steam/GOG/Humble Bundle sales, while you might be a year or 2 behind, that also means your PC can be a year or 2 behind. So you can delay upgrades or upgrade with components that might be a bit behind the cutting edge/top of the line stuff but are cheaper and still run the "older" games just as well.
Re:Much more than (Score:5, Funny)
As always, there's an xkcd [xkcd.com] for that
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The problem being that the money goes to fluff like graphics, sound, and voice (including big name voice actors), while skimping on the budget for an acctual plot, game play, and fun
Except you can't buy the latter. Plot, game play and fun are functions of the fundamentals, not a function on development budget. You can absolutely have amazingly fun indie games with great plot, and you can have amazingly fun AAA games.
Developers always think they are on a win, it takes a 3rd party to tell someone that their ideas are rubbish. Changing the financing model won't change this at all. Just like there's rubbish indie and low budget games as well.
Hollywood is a great example as they two are abl
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The problem being that the money goes to fluff like graphics, sound, and voice (including big name voice actors), while skimping on the budget for an acctual plot, game play, and fun
Except you can't buy the latter. Plot, game play and fun are functions of the fundamentals, not a function on development budget. You can absolutely have amazingly fun indie games with great plot, and you can have amazingly fun AAA games.
Developers always think they are on a win, it takes a 3rd party to tell someone that their ideas are rubbish. Changing the financing model won't change this at all. Just like there's rubbish indie and low budget games as well.
Hollywood is a great example as they two are able to produce fantastic hits and garbage completely irrespective of movie budget.
It should be in the interests of game companies to pay for some competent researchers to identify what qualities make a game fun and then use that information. Much research has been done on what makes a game addictive (power law distribution of reward anyone?) but fun is not the same thing.
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The $60-$70 sticker price really only applies within the first few months of release, and only to AAA titles. You'll regularly find games that are only 6 months old already being discounted during sales, especially if they under-performed commercially. In addition, most indie games charge far below $60.
That said, I haven't paid over $30 for a game in decades. If you're willing to just wait a few years to play games eventually they come on sale at much cheaper prices. And for the vast majority of games those
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Also the overall market for games is larger now: many people who grew up playing video games haven't stopped playing them. And there are now more countries where people have enough money to be able to afford spending some on entertainment. Therefore development costs can be spread out over more unit sales.
Re:Much more than (Score:4, Interesting)
I buy most of my games on Steam, and I almost never spend more than ten bucks on a game. It means I don't get the AAA titles until several years after they have fallen into obscurity, but that's fine with me, as I already have a gaming backlog in my current library that I will probably never complete.
This form of entertainment is....SO cheap.....if you don't have to stay on the cutting edge at every moment.
And anyway, if the market bears a $70 price tag for AAA titles, I don't see that as anything to worry about. It's just economics. If you can't afford that.....buy the cheap games like I do!
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Digital only. I used to get games for discounts. Those nearly don't exist anymore. There are no shelves stocked with games that need to be sold or dumped to make way for new titles, and the bargain bins are gone. Now, before people object - I know about the Steam sales, I know about GOG sales. But the prices drop much more slowly now. It used to be I could wait a year and drop $20 or more off of a game price. Now it takes a few years before you start seeing reasonable discounts. To be fair, it is improving and is much better than it was a decade ago, but the problem of a zero cost warehouse and retail does affect price.
Do you know https://isthereanydeal.com/ [isthereanydeal.com]? Great site to check current and historic deals across dozens of stores. $20 off is like what? 30%? That's an ok deal for a fairly recent game in my experience. 50-75% off for something 1-2 years old is pretty standard.
Buying games before 1-2 years after release is largely pointless anyway these days. It takes that long for all the DLC to come out and bugs to get fixed. By then you can get the GOTY/complete edition of the game for cheap during sales. The exception bei
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Correct, they have more than doubled assuming typical inflationary rates.
Incorrect, [in2013dollars.com] they have gone up around 50% using actual inflation rates.
Budgets wasted on advertising (Score:2)
I will make it a point to avoid these games with very few exceptions. The game that gave me the most entertainment 2019/2020 did cost around $25.
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1000 hours on Terraria gang.
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True that. The game I have been playing the most recently was Oxygen not Included, and IIRC I got it on a sale for less than 15.
Indie games have certainly become better and better lately, and they certainly are more interesting than Call of Battlefield $current_year.
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Indeed. Factorio is another one. Or Terraria as mentioned above. Or Grimrock 1/2 and Vaporum. Or The Shortest Trip to Earth. Comparatively small teams, but they actually have ideas!
I think the only AAA title I am going to buy this year is Cyberpunk 2077. That is if all the expectations pan out. But if they do then this will be an exceptional game.
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Depends (Score:2)
I would pay $70 for Skyrim, which I can play for months. I won't play $70 for God of War, which I find fun for a couple of playthroughs, tops.
Honestly, to me it doesn't matter either way, as I usually wait for the discounted "Game of the Year" edition with all the DLC already.
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And realize that probably more was spent on development for Skyrim, which took several years, than was spent on God of War.
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Depends on the game. Pure narrative game, yes - once you know the story, the incentive to reply goes down greatly. But games that incorporate a random element, or variable challenge? Much more replayable.
I've been through Oxygen not Included a few times. Each game throws a different level at me, so I have to adapt my approach. Eventually I got good enough that I could handle anything that the game might throw at me, and moved to other games, but I didn't master it on a single asteroid.
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Why does a sprinter run the same 100m over and over. To get a better score or time. Really depends if you're playing the game for the exploration and experience or the challenge.
Re: Depends (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't get it. Why would you play a game more than once? You've literally seen it all. Are you part goldfish? ;)
Different classes give you different play styles. Depending on the game, different choices can take you along different paths of the narrative, giving you different endings or seeing different events or the same events from different angles. Sometimes you just miss things that you want to go back and find, or redo side quests you skipped to rush through the main storyline.
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I'm guessing you don't play many games? Or perhaps, you don't play many different types of games?
Games such as RPGs offer massive replay value, with lots of sidequests, different characters to create or recruit, and vastly different playstyles to enjoy depending on the type of character you create.
Some games are explicitly designed to be very short in length, where you see just a bit of the game and learn a little more each playthrough, trying to reach a "good" ending. Two examples I can think of offhand
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I've been playing Tetris for at least 30 years. I guess that makes me a goldfish.
How was the one round you played?
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They already do (Score:2)
Yes, you can buy them at 50 bucks. But then there's 0-day DLC for another 20, and you better buy it because that DLC is essentially the ending of the game, not a real DLC.
If anything, this would just be more honesty on the side of the studios, not a price hike. The price IS already 70 bucks, that's basically just stopping to insult their customers' intelligence.
Re: They already do (Score:2)
Oh you sweet summer child, thinking the end will now be included...
You'll be paying $70 for what we in the 90s, called the shareware version or a demo.
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Ah, so it's 70 now for the game and still 20 (or more) on top of that.
Of course, what was I thinking...
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I added UbiSoft and Blizzard to the fold. Thinking about it, I only buy indie games anymore. They cost like 20 bucks and the hit/miss ratio has been about on par with titles from big studios.
If your $70 game has MTX I pirate it. (Score:2)
Subject.
In fact, if your game has MTX in it, I pirate it.
Re: If your $70 game has MTX I pirate it. (Score:2)
MTX?
Is that some fusion between DMT and Semtex?
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Microtransactions.
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If it has microtransactions, it ain't even worth the bandwidth to copy it.
But for how long. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with modern consoles and video games is how long you can actually play them for. They all seem to want to connect to the cloud, and in a decade or so. The gaming company just doesn't want to support the services that host the gaming platform.
And sets of overprotective copyright laws makes sure that the community can't play the game they have purchased on their own. Because they will not give you the source to the server component or give you options to change servers.
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I can only repeat myself from further up, if you accept this, you're part of the problem. I simply started to refuse buying games that require me to be online for the single player content. I can accept that eventually the game's maker turns off the multiplayer servers. It's not exactly something I enjoy and I would (and do) rather buy games that allow me to run my own servers, but that's a concession I'm willing to make, especially in games where the multiplayer aspect is of a secondary concern to me.
But i
Loosing battle (Score:4, Insightful)
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I managed to go over a decade before upgrading my last PC, because I just lost all interest in the games that are being put out these days. I can't bring myself to pay $60 for a demo of a shitty game. Even on the rare occasion something like Dragon Age comes out, it gets turned to crap by the second or third game. GTA 5 is still going for full price, 5 years after release. Civ 6, which is barely different from Civ 5 without the expansions, will cost you upwards of $100 for the full thing. I took a chance on
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The last game I actually had fun playing was Quake 1. Not NetQuake, but the original.
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There is an increasingly large number of good indie games out there, ones with replay value, and priced well below the $60 (now $70) mark. Digital distribution and lower barriers to entry have resulted in more options. Many of the games I buy are below $30 and play as good as a AAA game. Maybe the graphics aren't at the same level but the immersion is still there, the puzzles still challenging and entertaining.
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You mean "fixed" (Score:5, Informative)
"It wasn't until 2005 that a retail price was unofficially standardized."
TFA means to say "fixed". This is price fixing, not "standardization".
Increasingly you get nothing physical when buying a game. There is 0 manufacturing/packaging/shipping costs to recoup.
Re: You mean "fixed" (Score:2)
Remember that price fixing is a crime that gets one prison.
But it takes somebody to sue.
And that takes somebody not carpet-bombed with "its just standardization" brainwashing PR Kool-Aid bombs.
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You're deeply confused.
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I don't pay for cable TV or streaming music services either.
I have a physical DVD and CD collection, as well as a physical game collection.
My point is: it is silly to spend a premium to get nothing in return.
No Interest in AAA (Score:5, Insightful)
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I also like being able to finish a game. So I'd rather play a $15 game that I can finish in 8 hours than a $60 game that I'll probably lose interest in halfway through.
You mean for even more superficial graphics? (Score:2)
And even less actual content, even with all tue DLCs that make its actual price closer to somewhere around $300.
For yet another Doom clone, at best. But more like a loveless cargo cult off-the-assembly-line player milking machine.
But hey, you keep paying, just like you keep voting for only the same two proven-enemies-of-the-people parties, so ... Fuck you too.
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This. ^^
Fuck these marketing people (Score:2)
I say the price needs to be lower for digitally downloaded games.
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I used to scream this about e-book prices but they still sold for about the same as the hardcover versions. I finally had to come to terms that I was paying for the content of the story and not for the medium it comes on. Now, I just wish that when I decide to get the paper version, the digital version should be included for free. Same could apply for game discs.
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I would be cool with paying the same price for digital content IF I knew those extra profits they're getting from the savings on physical medium went right to the artists. But we all know they aren't.
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if you play PC games. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait a few months....Buy it on Steam when it goes on sale.
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*other platforms are available.
As for steam, I don't think I have bought anything direct from them in years! Always use humble or something.
Overdue how? (Score:2)
Games nowadays are often heavily discounted in sales including all DLC for less than $20. There are less used game sales going on than ever which means more money goes to publishers and developers. Games can be sold directly and without retail expenses. Games are making more money than any other entertainment medium. Games of next gen quality can already be found on PC and not at $70.
I'm pretty sure they don't need to be $70.
I don't mind paying $70 bucks (Score:2)
But if you're also going to tack on Microtransactions everywhere then I've got a problem. NBA 2k is really bad about this, and while it's not my kind of game I know people who are pissed because if you want to go through the single player mode and build a super player ala Micheal Jordon or Magic Johnson expect to spend $100 bucks on top of that $70 to get the in game currency you need.
Sports game
Game price no longer represents value (Score:5, Informative)
When a $15 indie game can provide endless entertainment, a $60 AAA title gets discounted to $35 less than a month after launch (Borderlands), a game literally has a different pre-order price depending on which console you want it on (NBA 2k21 is $60 on PS4 and $70 on PS5 based on the pre-order), or games are literally so much of a re-skin of the previous game that they literally forget to update some in game content and stll show FIFA 2018 on some banners even though you're playing 2019, pricing no longer makes sense.
It's like Fallout 76, a full price game released at a sub par quality, with such nasty copy and pasting that literally the ending boss was copied from another game complete with animation and all, but that's okay I'm sure they'll discount.... WTF they announced a $100/year subscription fee to play.
Or maybe RDR2 which flat out didn't work for a large portion of the population.
Nothing in the game industry makes sense. I'll pay $70 for a great game. I will never again buy a game until several weeks after release. I've never pre-ordered and frankly I think less of people who do pre-order games.
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a $60 AAA title gets discounted to $35 less than a month after launch
That's because at that point the base game is being used to get the foot in the door. Sell the base game for cheap so people buy the DLC.
Or maybe RDR2 which flat out didn't work for a large portion of the population. Nothing in the game industry makes sense. I'll pay $70 for a great game. I will never again buy a game until several weeks after release. I've never pre-ordered and frankly I think less of people who do pre-order games.
Yea, I don't get the point of preordering or even buying around release. You won't be able to play the complete game until a year later once all the DLC has been released. Not to mention that you have to deal with a buggy and badly balanced game until until they get around to patching it. Just wait a while and get a complete, patched version for cheap.
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It's like Fallout 76, a full price game released at a sub par quality, with such nasty copy and pasting that literally the ending boss was copied from another game complete with animation and all, but that's okay I'm sure they'll discount.... WTF they announced a $100/year subscription fee to play.
I just picked it up on Steam for $20 during the summer sale. No subscription required. I guess there's a premium paid for tier that basically gets you private servers, some extra storage, and then monthly currency to spend in their store which is basically just cosmetics, skins, emotes, and maybe some furniture for your camp. Nothing that prevents you from playing without forking over money regularly.
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WTF they announced a $100/year subscription fee to play.
It seems modern slashdot is out of touch with the nerds of the 90's... so let me tell you how it is...
As someone who was there when the stupid half of the nerd kingdom didn't get they were being robbed when Ultima online, everquest and guild wars 1 were released. Those were the trial balloons in the war on game ownership and most people at it right up. The game industry has known most of its customers are morons since the mid to late 90's.
Now I can feel the ire and downvotes coming so its time for a bit o
Reference (Score:2)
"initially" (Score:3)
We live in a very different game-world today, than we did thirty years ago when I wan ten. In my life, PC gaming has become effectively free.
When I was ten, I used to save-up for months to buy a $30 game. When I was sixteen, I used to save-up for weeks, then cut class, and spend a half-day in a game store to decide how to spend my $40.
Today, I'm 40 years-old. It might take me a day to save-up $60, but there's no way that I'd choose to spend a day's savings on a video game. I've got far better and bigger hobbies. $60 of gas gets me more hours of sportscar driving than it does playing video games. It gets me way more hours of kayaking too.
But PC gaming now lives on Steam. And Steam has a catalogue-wide sale every season. And there are a dozen seasons every year (new year's, valentines, spring, mother's day, father's day, summer, christmas, back-to-school, et cetera).
There's no $60 game that isn't $30 within a year, or $20 within two years, or $10 eventually. So I basically get to pick my price. Either I get to wait for the game that I want, or I get to find a game at the price I want to pay.
These days, there are so many new and good games every week. So neither is at all difficult to do.
I'm forty, with a career. I can spend $10 without noticing. I can spend $20 without caring. My wife steals $100 whenever she needs cash for the nail salon -- right out of my wallet! The house breaks and I'm forced to spend at least $1'000 at least three times a year. This year claimed a tvision, a subwoofer, and the afore-mentioned car's a/c condenser.
PC gaming is now effectively free for any working adult.
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Sounds like you have some serious basic home maintenance issues!
I don't know if it's ignorance, indifference, or a mix of both but you'd do well to invest in some basic home improvements. It sounds like it'll save you quite a bit, even in the near term.
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Not sure why you'd think that $3'000 per year is a lot of house maintenance. It's a big house I guess.
The tvision lasted nine years, it's one of four. It would have been nice had it lasted ten, but I can't say that it owes me anything after nine years.
The sportscar is now eleven years old. It routinely costs me 1-to-4 thousand per year, averaging under 2. A car for $2'000 per year is fantastic value for any car, and this is a sportscar. The second car costs under $1'000 a year now, and it's seven years
Games are underpriced (Score:2)
I remember paying $50-$70 for NES and SNES carts in the late '80s and early 90s. Since then prices have remained pretty steady or fell, and while games no longer ship expensive ROMs, development team sizes and production costs have ballooned. Any other savings realized by cheaper manufacturing and distribution have probably been eaten by inflation.
The reason we've seen so much push for DLC and special editions and loot boxes and battle passes and the like is the extra revenue provided by some of those fra
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I remember paying $50-$70 for NES and SNES carts in the late '80s and early 90s.
Same, and that's without adjusting for inflation.
Unfortunate (Score:2)
Get a PC (Score:2)
Consoles games have been even more expensive than that for years now in Canada, this must be why I know more PC gamers than console gamers. Steam and others have games on sale all the time, console games not so much.
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How many hours does it take to "finish" one of these games?
So what is your hourly cost for entertainment? What's that? Not much?
How cheap can people be?
Jezz.
I'll pay the extra $10, as long as they don't follow up a couple months later with DLC that should have been included in the base game for $20, or sell a "season pass" for $30-40. Even worse is the "Day 1 DLC" but that seems to have fallen by the wayside (they probably still have it ready at launch, they just wait a little bit to be a little more subtle about the money grab). That's honestly why I rarely pay full price for games anymore. If you wait a year or 2 you can get twice the content for half the p
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Let's say a modern game, $70, with two to three hours of game play then you dump it in a bin. Better deal to head to the cinema and pay cinema prices for snacks.
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What about a "modern" game determines if it is fun or not. The last "modern" game I played entertained me for a solid 14 hours.
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How cheap people can be depends entirely on if they think they are being milked or not, especially when some games at full price are frigging painful to finish, some games have a sticker price but are incomplete in game (Zero day DLC), or some games are literally reskins of another game to the point where in some cases they forgot to remove the previous textures, e.g. FIFA 2019 (I think it was) which if you looked closely at the stadium still had FIFA 2018 written on it.
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How many hours does it take to "finish" one of these games? So what is your hourly cost for entertainment? What's that? Not much? How cheap can people be?
Part of the problem is that the full price of the game from the big companies are increasingly an incomplete game with additional money being required to get the full game. In years past that might have been paid DLC add-ons to finish the game. Then came loot boxes. Also there are pay-to-win items which have started out by giving some players unfair advantages in multi-player scenarios and in some cases to being absolutely necessary to complete the game. In increasingly egregious examples, the additional pa
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I mean, wtf?
You asked specifically why people are complaining and then after explaining why they were complaining you dismissed all of it. Let's start with the obvious: People don't have omnipotence. Many times people don't know how broken these games are when they buy them. They don't know that these games are essentially incomplete that require additional money later. They don't know how companies will alter the game play with micro-transactions after the game has been purchased.
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If they waited a year or two for the reviews and find out from early adopters, then they would know.
You're saying everyone should wait a year or two to play a game? Do you wait a year or two from seeing a film or TV show? That's ridiculous.
I mean, you don't have to buy right away.
And game companies could not put micro-transactions in the game either.
Plus, after getting burned once, you'd think they would wise up and be a lot more careful then next time.
Did you read above where it was different companies? Do you play video games or are you making generalized statements with no knowledge here?
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The length of the game doesn't have to equal the length of entertainment. I have plenty of 40-50 hour PSX and PS2 games that I never finished. And that was before the trend of open world games and progression systems that make playing a game into so much of a chore that some publishers try to sell you microtransactions to skip ahead.
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How cheap can people be?
A lot of people pirate because they feel they're entitled to whatever entertainment they want, for free.
That's how cheap people can be.
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Of course, unless you want me to rise up and start some kind of protest movement. Gotta fill that free time somehow.
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If you could guarantee me that I actually get any fun out of a game, we could talk. But you can't do that. And worse, I can usually not even throw the game back at its maker and get my money back if it turns out to be a content-less cash grab. So I carry the risk that the game stinks (and no, trailers and box art have never been relevant, they are even less now that you can tart up even the worst stinker with flashy graphics and the promise of some gimmicky effects).
If I get to carry a risk, I expect someth
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but if you're on minimum wage should you be spending so much time playing games anyway?
Who are you to question how people of any income bracket spend their free time provided it's not hurting anyone? Bettering one's position in life only comes from desire, sometimes people just want to relax and not have to think about things for a while.
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Who am I? Who are you?
If people try to live beyond their means and then complain that things should be cheaper because they can't afford them, then I think my criticism is valid. I can go around bitching that the Four Seasons hotels should be cheaper, but really who am I to go around telling them how much they should charge? If I can't afford the Four Seasons, well, TravelLodge it is...
Re: Why is this an issue? (Score:2)
Encouraging people to get themselves skilled in something more in-demand is bad now?
Why would anyone bother learning to code and make games if they can earn the same amount doing something less needed? You wouldn't even have video games at any price then.
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Re:Overdue? My ass. (Score:5, Insightful)
Games are more profitable than they've ever been.
See that's the problem: They are profitable enough to you. They are not profitable enough for some companies like EA who would like to charge hundreds of dollars per game if they could. But that would cause an immediate backlash if they raised the true price. So these companies have relied heavily on hiding the true price by adding things like pay-to-win items, payable DLC, loot boxes, season passes, etc. For EA one their biggest profit came from loot boxes where are increasingly being banned. I think the UK just last week ruled loot boxes as gambling and thus must be regulated as gambling. Now big game companies are scrambling to find other ways of making that money which they had been getting away with charging.
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Clarification on the UK: We completed a report last week which very strongly urges the government to regulate loot boxes as gambling. It's not a legally binding conclusion, but it puts a lot of pressure on the government to do something. But with the plague currently taking full attention, and the fiasco of brexit lurking in the background ready to screw things up, gambling reform is not high on the legislative priority list.
exA-Arcadia charges over 1000 USD (Score:2)
[Video games] are not profitable enough for some companies like EA who would like to charge hundreds of dollars per game if they could.
exA-Arcadia is charging upwards of $1,200 for game software [exa.ac]. This doesn't include the system board or arcade cabinet that they fit into.
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Honest question: Why do you let them nickle-and-dime you? As long as you play along, you're part of the problem.
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Just wait until they're on sale. The Switch store has sales fairly often, and it's sometimes the really top-tier games. Mostly I buy smaller rogue-lite games, though, so it doesn't really matter. The Switch virtual store is FULL of great, sub-$25CDN games.
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Price stickiness [wikipedia.org] is an old, standard, and very well-known economic effect.
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Not individually it doesn't.
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Similar to you I have been trained to wait a 6-12 months for games to get enough patches to be playable, by which time I kind of don't care anymore and rarely buy things that were on my wish list. My last mistake was GTA V. Took a few days to thrashing around with a buggy downloader to get it to install (and that was despite waiting a few months after the PC launch). Every couple months I try to fire it up and have to wait for a multi-GB update and lose interest. Most I have been to be utterly frustrate
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> Not paying to be a Beta tester to those asshats again.
My thoughts exactly.
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Doom 1 was revolutionary and mind blowing compared to its competition when released. Today's titles are only fractionally different (and occasionally fractionally better) than the existing start of the art.