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.
Activision makes billions every time they release COD and now they’re $70 and you still have ads and microtransactions. It’s the same justification for streaming services and premium versions and you still get ads, just “reduced”
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.
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.
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
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.
Wouldn’t that just drive people to pirate more?
Why would a good capitalist company that implements microtransactions remove them if they raised prices? That would just be leaving money on the table.
i have ultra broke friends that will scrape and scrounge to upgrade video cards so they can play really pretty looking games at launch and they’re always trying to get me to upgrade my shit so i can be part of the spectacle. we’re all well into our 40s now and playing some new game on the highest settings just doesn’t improve my quality of life the way that it did when i was in my early 20s. if i’m gonna drop some hundos on something now, it’s gonna be like shelving or tools to make my life easier. there are so many enjoyable games that are run like a dream on a 5+ year old video card.
trying to stay on top of all the latest is rich people shit and it’s wild to me how many not-rich people get sucked onto the treadmill.
My 10 year old computer runs Hades and Baba Is You just fine. There is literally no reason for me to “upgrade”
The only reason I want to upgrade my 8+ year old rig is so I can play rimworld and factorio with an absurd amount of mods without crashing or 40m loading times. But I can’t afford it so I just suffer them
my primary video gaming over the last 3 years has been driving around and making crappy little movies with GTA online which is ~10 years old and farting around in Terraria. lately i’ve been on the fence about either getting BotW for my switch or waiting a little longer on that and instead getting SNES/arcade emulator situation streamlined with some bluetooth controllers for when my nephew visits during xmas so we can play shit like Bomberman for SNES or maybe some co-op beat em ups.
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.
Given that games are like the ultimate luxury product, I really couldn’t care less if the treat-addicted gamer piggies have to pay more. What I do care about is developers being compensated fairly for their work.
My hope is that it would allow Independent developers to actually sell their products at a fair price, since there seems to be the implicit expectation that they can’t cost more than $20, despite often being better than comparable AAA products.
Not to mention that the market is much smaller for Indie games so they end up suffering twice.
Cool, still gonna steal em.
Ok, now can you tell me why adjusting for inflation has a single thing to do with what the price of something should be?
Gaming is a bigger industry than Hollywood. Do you think they are running on low margins or something?
You dare suggest the shareholders don’t get the maximum profits they worked so hard to create???
Charge me more for my slop
This is a really good point since videogames are a niche interest with high original development costs.
Not like companies are charging $70 for the same shit every year and you don’t even get a physical copy of it anymore.
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