this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Maybe I'm just old but $70 base is too much for any game let alone one from a studio with known issues
Games have been the same price for over thirty years, they've not changed with inflation and production costs have skyrocketed. To an extent the increased market has helped keep costs down for the consumer but it's not unreasonable to see prices shift upwards.
What about the cost of disc media that's absolutely disappeared? That was a huge chunk of the overhead. Logistics to get the copies to all the stores, etc.
Now it's just electricity and servers to download from.
Do you ever notice that no one ever talks about all the advancements that saved money? Of course not, cause then they'd never be able to justify continually hiking the prices up.
Distribution platforms like Steam charge 30% for their service.
I am genuinely not trying to sound like a studio apologist, because there are myriad reasons to be upset with them, but y'all need to think these arguments through a little better. I haven't pulled up any numbers, but are we really going to pretend that the cost of producing a game in 1990 is even remotely comparable to that of a modern day AAA game? The fact that video game costs have remained relatively steady and even decreased in some cases for decades should be astonishing.
Pick a different argument.
Pick a non-strawman argument and then we can have a discussion. They had different methods of creating games yes, but were they easier back then than they are now? I don't think so, they had people inventing the fucking wheel of what could be possible and we still had a consistent price tag with a FEATURE COMPLETE package. They didn't have as many workers as they did because all of the programming went to those individual developers to figure out. The amount of work is more intricately spread out in these bigger studios, but the passion and creativeness was more alive back in the early days. None of it was automated with fully polished dev tools and externally hired language teams.
The only strawman argument here is yours. Most people wouldn't play a game released today if it looked like Pong and had the same gameplay features. Also, there are a lot more wheels to invent today.
I'm not just talking about Pong, and that is another good example of a strawman argument ironically.
How are you missing that you are literally comparing a team of 5 programmers and artists to games made by 500+ people?
I mean seriously you can read, that alone should be enough.
Lots of games today force some sort of online element (ex. Cloud saves, workshop content, multiplayer, etc.) I wonder how much that costs them to maintain. I can't imagine it's that significant if they are dealing with multiple single player games.
Probably not as much as the money they derive from the live service model.
Businesses do what makes them the most money.
Steam is more expensive than discs.
There's no way in hell that paying steam is more expensive than buying dics, putting your game on those discs, putting those discs in cases, and then paying to ship those cases all over the world.
Know how I know? Because businesses do whatever is the most profitable, and clearly digital distro is cheaper since we've been pushing for it since it was invented.
The customer base has increased more than a thousandfold. If anything prices should go down.
Yeah my parents were paying $60 for NES games for me... Which is why I had like 3 NES games. The only reason game aren't $180 now is competition... And reproducibility vs size of market... And physical media is cheap or non-existent. Ok there are a few reasons, but still...
Eh, to me I usually just convert it to $ per hour of enjoyment. Will I get 10 hours of enjoyment? 100? 1000?
If it's a great game and I think I'll get 1000 hours out of it, even if it's $70 that's like $0.07 per hour.
Compare that to paying $30 to go see a 1.5 hour movie at the theater and you're doing pretty darn good I think. Even if you only get 10 hours out of it thats $7 an hour for entertainment vs the $20 an hour for a movie.
$30 for a movie is insane
I've paid 15 dollars to play risk of rain 2 for 500 hours. I gurantee you there is no triple A studio in the world that would get that many hours out of me nor would their game be even double that price
Fair expectations from a complete adult /s
what'd you mean?
Smash Melee cost $86.48 on release when accounting for inflation.
I wouldn't buy smash bros for 90 bucks either
You're missing the point. Games are cheaper now then they were then.
So are wages
As opposed to the $60 they have been since the NES was the hot new console?
I don't buy $60 games either mate
I always found it kinda funny how gamers rage about the poor quality of games, but bugs with Bethesda is almost an expectation
Do you really get that vibe? I feel like a lot of people refer to Bethesda games as a buggy mess. There's the whole Bugthesda thing.
I think all the mods designed to improve performance have helped the reputation a bit but I still wouldn't play Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 due to the bugs.
I see both. For some reason there are still a lot of people who like their games despite the bugs and will defend them very vocally. I understand liking what you like (even if I strongly disagree) but it never makes sense to say an obvious issue isn't an issue
A lot of the time I think they are overlooking the bugs and focusing on the game as a whole. Kind of with the mentality that once you get past the buggy husk you get the tasty kernels inside.
Fallout 3 (through Steam) was unplayable without mods for a while because Games For Windows Live was used as DRM and was shutdown years ago but if you checked the Steam reviews a significant amount of people omitted this or were fine with the game (mostly) working once you got over that hurdle.
Personally I didn't think this was unacceptable considering the GOG version worked fine but it goes to show the mentality people have.