https://ma.fellr.net/@fell/111504811722666890
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You won’t like hearing this, but video games must become more expensive. When I was little, my dad got me a PlayStation 2 for christmas, but without any games. My mum was very generous and took me out to pick two games for it. They were 60€ each. Nowadays you would call those full-price games. But now, 20 years later, a full-price game is still about 60€. If you correct that for inflation, it should really be 86€ now. And that’s not even covering the fact that games have massively increased in visual fidelity, which is much more expensive to produce. If you don’t want games to be littered with microtransactions or ads, then you have to accept that a regular video game must be at least 90€. (98 USD, 77 GBP, 149 AUD, 134 CAD) #Gaming #GameDev #GameDevelopment #Steam #Inflation #Economy #PlayStation
Can’t wait to buy the next installment of insert sports game here/call of duty for 100 USD base, 200 for the dlc, maybe even 300 for the ultimate deluxe extreme version.
ALSO you don’t raise prices to “adjust to inflation,” that’s not how inflation works. Raising prices IS the inflation.
And inflation doesn’t work the same way uniformly across all products. Electronics and entertainment products famously tend to decrease in value in real dollars… hell sometimes even just in absolute terms, pretty sure a computer cost more in 1990 dollars in 1990 than one did in 2005 in 2005 dollars. The strategy for these products is to become profitable by becoming less niche because people tend to have a pretty low tolerance for expensive entertainment products.
Imagine if electronics prices had scaled by both quality and inflationary pressure since the 1980s. You’d need a mortgage to afford TVs that I can find in the Best Buy discount bin.
Ok now adjust my salary by inflation
my favorite living Russian is FitGirl
Literally just installed a repack this morning. All hail
i saw she was asking for donations for the first time in a couple years, i just gotta make a crypto account or something but i guess there is maybe 4 reasons to use crypto, albeit somewhat illegal reasons haha.
She does good work. Shame about the unhinged bigotry though.
Are you thinking of EMPRESS, cause I don’t remember FitGirl being a bigot (might have just missed it)
It is absolutely true that, adjusted for inflation, video games were more expensive in ye olden days; an NES at launch costed more, inflation adjusted, than a PS5 costs today.
The fatal flaw they’ve committed here is that they’re applying macroeconomic shifts to a microeconomic product. Inflation is a measure of total prices, prices can go down or stay neutral in one sector while drastically increasing in others and hence net inflation. Tech is notorious as a sector where real prices have dropped, as there’s way more factors in prices than “muh polygon count.” The PS2 era was much less competitive than the current era, for example.
Also, just, manufacturing has developed a lot. It’s possibly cheaper today for Nintendo to have a Switch cartridge made than it was to have an NES cartridge made back in the day, at least factoring in scale.
Not to mention they’re selling them to a exponentially larger market and are saving buckets of money by not bothering with physical products anymore
If it is singeplayer never pay.
Okay but do pay if you enjoy a game and want to support it?
Like, AAA games are ass and have been but like I’m not gonna steal a copy of Hades when I’ve loved everything supergiant games has put out and would love to see more.
Okay but do pay if you enjoy a game and want to support it?
In a world where everyone knew how to pirate your money would matter more. As it stands piracy doesnt make that big of an impact overall. The biggest decider IMO should be if the company is publicly traded or if youre just broke and can only afford to pay for a VPN. Hades isnt a great example either since that game is routinely on sale for $20 or less. I got it on Switch for $15 i think.
I’m just saying there is a big difference between never pay for ANY game that is single player, and only pay for what you believe deserves support.
good rule of thumb is pirate AAA games and buy indie games when you can
98% of consumers will take the path of least resistance when it comes to popular games which means they’re not going to learn to torrent. I wouldn’t pirate Hades, but I also wouldn’t care if someone did.
I’d argue the opposite. With single player I get exactly what I want out of the game from day one, and I have the same value no matter what. If it’s multi-player I’m depending on other people playing it, there’s always microtransactions or paying for season passes or whatever, so I think it’s best to not pay if you can avoid it.
Very few online multiplayer games can be played pirated. Mainstream ones at least.
Local multiplayer, or games that require a premade: yes, good point. I’ve been burned a few times on that front.
Wait until you learn about assassins creed buddy
sad donationware developer noises
the market for games has also exploded though
very popular game in the late nineties would be lucky to break a million sales in it’s opening week
now that’s completely expected for any aaa game no matter how shittangentially related
get your games for free at
rutracker
gog-games
vimm’s lair
NXbrewExpanding this list (sorry for the garbage formatting):
Fitgirl-repacks.site
dodi-repacks.site
Archive.org also has a ton of retro games/roms/bios files
if you can’t afford to price your game at $60, then you should just make a smaller game. AAA game devs should stop pumping out bloated garbage
There’s like a billion gamers now, anything above 15 money is theft and should be pirated
I pirate all games unless they’re indy titles( which is what i usually play) It’s also very ethical and morally good to pirate.
Same. Torrenting a game with 20 DLC’s is so satisfying ngl
I’m not just going to say no, but I’m going to say hell no. For instance, my pet peeve this season is having loved Mortal Kombat for over two decades, only to find that they’re implementing a wi-fi filter to essentially tell players like me, who live in a place where we can’t just run 50 to 100ft of ethernet line to suit some pissy settler on the other side of the state, that we’re not welcome. What the actual black-and-blue fuck makes publishers think I’m paying 70 bucks for some fuckshit that can filter me out of the reason I came to it, which is for competition?
No cap I fuckin hate gamers nowadays. Seems like they’re all spineless corporatized wretches who’re just LOOKING for reasons to split the wallet open for their overlords.
It’s so hard already to play fighting games competitively online when the frame data is basically useless. How do you manage playing on wifi and stay sane?
I’ve been playing on wifi since MK9, never once had an issue with it bad enough to render frame data useless; but even if I did start hitting issues with it, why the fuck haven’t western developers started implementing rollback natively? ArcSys killed my favorite offering out of them and I’m still probably going to have to go learn FighterZ because it’s the only fighter testing rollback on the market that immediately comes to mind and has immediate knowledge of the setting out of me.
Skullgirls is cool if you ignore half the roster and the single player campaigns, and you can totally swing wifi on that.
Remember in June when there was that controversy when Skullgirls developers willingly altered their own games to be less creepy towards underage characters, and also minimized any glorification of racial violence?
Because nothing says “moral decline” quite like artists unpacking their own ethics and realizing when they might have communicated an unintentional message.
Oh I remember (though I personally disagree on the Big Band scene since it wasn’t glorifying racial violence). If you look at updates to this day, like 2/3 of the comment sections are consumed by people screaming about “censorship” over literally just that one update. Still.
I can’t help but wonder how many of them aren’t even skullgirls fans and just terminally online culture war veterans.
Between you and me, I never even heard of skullgirls until the “controversy” hit, and I’ve been a pretty avid gamer for most of my life.
Well, fighting games are a niche with almost no crossover, but to FG enthusiast Skullgirls has been on the public radar for a while (with long periods of going dormant).
Based on analytics, a ton of the people whining are indeed just culture warriors, because the “controversy” has massively shifted the review score but hardly budged the number of players online. It is basically a review bombing and harassment campaign run off of Twitter or something.
Might be a hot take to some Skullgirls diehards, but if I’ve gotta ignore literally half the roster, I can’t see a point in buying in/can’t really call it good. Like, I’d sooner pick up some shonen arena battler that I don’t know the source material of before I picked up a hard 2d fighter where I needed to ignore that much of the roster.
Hey, you do you. imo it’s worth it because the good half are some of the most engaging characters in fighting games (and the others are mechanically interesting, just too pornbrained). But I would never blame anyone for being repulsed by the pornbrain part, it’s why I prefer games like 3rd Strike, which only have a tiny bit of pornbrain.
There’s also Them’s Fighting Herds, if you have an easier time with brony-ism, since it isn’t quite on the level of Skullgirls in anything buy net code, but is still both highly accessible and sophisticated.
The audience size when this person was little was a tiny fraction of the size of the audience today.
In their first year of sales, GTA 3 sold 4 million copies, and GTA 5 sold 45 million. If we adjust for both inflation and increased sales to make the same amount of money, GTA 5 should have sold for $6.60 a copy.
I mean GTA 3 was not the peak of the GTA series. San Andreas sold 18 million copies on the PS2 alone, with nearly 30 million copies sold across all systems by 2011.
San Andreas released in 2004, so 30 million in 7 years. GTA V released in 2013, and in 2020 it had sold 130 million copies.
San Andreas launched at $50 a copy, which adjusted to 2013 dollars is $63 a copy. $50 * 30M copies / 130M copies = 14.53 To make the same amount of money GTA V should’ve had a launch price of ~$14.50. Better, but not by much. Video game prices should be lower.
Also, games 20-30 years ago came on ROM cartridges which were relatively expensive to manufacture compared to optical discs. There’s a reason Nintendo 64 games were usually more expensive than Playstation games.
Now most games come in the form of a digital download, or an optical disc that just prompts a digital download anyway. And they both cost $60-$70
I mean it depends. The PS2 is the console with the most sales of all time, over 150 million units sold. It had the biggest install base in AAA gaming history. A lot of game franchise’s biggest sellers are still from the PS2 era. Need For Speed Most Wanted sold 18 million copies on all systems, which is still their record seller. GTA San Andreas sold 18 million on the PS2 alone, and nearly 30 million across all systems. Only GTA 5 with it’s billion re releases is more popular. Metal Gear Solid 2 is still holds the sales record for the franchise, with 7.4 million copies sold. Gran Turismo 3 is still the best selling Gran Turismo game with 15 million copies sold.
Honestly I think the gaming audience size peaked in the late PS2/Xbox - early PS3/X360 era in the mid 2000s. The 2008-09 financial crash hit the gaming industry hard, you can see that through total console sales. It basically extended the life of the PS3 and Xbox 360 by over 3 years, and they still had dissapointing sales numbers. Gaming is an expensive hobby for the majority of the world. I only think gaming is starting to recover now on the AAA front, you can see with the amount of sales the Nintendo switch and PS4 achieved in the late 2010s.
Gaming is an expensive hobby for the majority of the world.
The upfront cost is high, but the durability of the product makes it very cheap by hours-consumed. I spent around $350 to get my
Halo Playing MachineX-Box back in 2001, but holy fuck did my friends and I ever play the bajezus out of that one hit classic. Hundreds of hours, easily. Probably over a thousand if you count each of my friends. Compare that to an equivalent number of DVD rentals or frames of bowling or drinks at the local bar. Way cheaper than after school sports classes or summer camps. Cheaper even than a pair of roller blades and protective kit (and way cheaper than medical bills).Second-hand games (excluding the vintage collector’s market) make the hobby cheaper still. Right now, I can get a used PS4 and a fist-full of classics for half what I paid to play Halo, fairly easily.
Getting games day-of release is still a rich kid’s hobby. But nothing is stopping you from burning a hundred hours playing Starcraft or Mario Galaxy for pocket change.
You’re fixating on individual game sales over the total market. 2008-2009 did not really hit the industry hard. There is a mid-generation lul in the market for consoles that occurs in each console generation but besides that gaming really wasn’t particularly affected at all.
I also think you’re fixated on console here when PC and mobile platforms have exploded, particularly outside of NA/EU.
What this graph doesn’t tell you is that the market is nearly double what this graph shows now, $270bn.
You can’t just say “mobile doesn’t count” either when the top mobile games are HoK - a moba very similar to League, Genshin Impact which is just a port of pc/console, PubG which is yet another serious game, Roblox, etc etc. The mobile platform is a serious platform at this point where the highest revenue games are genuinely serious games.
Who was playing mobile games in 1996 and what kind of phone would even allow such a thing?
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Now a days you don’t need to absorb physical media costs and are open to the Chinese market. Almost half of all steam users now are from China.
This motherfucker pays for game. What a loser.
Video games have gone from niche to mainstream meaning they sell more copies than they used to. If we wanted to keep profits in line with where they were in the past, we would need to decrease the cost of games to compensate for the increase in sales.
I’ll go enjoy my fifth playthrough of a $20 indie game instead thanks
What if I told you games are actually priced efficiently for the current market? They don’t want the games to be more expensive because fewer people will buy them. They want microtransactions because they make more money with them then they would if games didn’t have them but were more expensive. The true desire of publishers is to have both expensive games and microtransactions. The market will eventually shift to have both, you’re already seeing it in some cases like MWIII. Once they hit the limit with microtransactions, they will raise prices on the base game. Don’t worry.
There was a time period in my country where games (especially brand new triple A releases) could be up to the equivalent of $90 USD. As a result, people bought fewer games and pirated a lot more, so they had to reduce their prices because charging more was causing them to actually make less profit.
