Game prices for the past 30 years haven’t kept pace with inflation.
I recognise the argument that publishers are shifting larger volumes of units now, which has been a factor that has allowed the industry to keep price increases below inflation for the last 30 years.
Wages not being even close to keeping up with inflation (especially housing inflation) is the real issue here, not the $70/$80 video game.
You should be angry at your reduced purchasing power in all of society, not just with the price of Nintendo games.
(Secondary less unpopular opinion, the best games out these days are multiplatform and released at least 5 years ago, buy them for << $80 and wait for sale the new releases, when they too are 5 years old)
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This is really about late stage capitalism and chasing infinite growth. Every year profits must go up X percentage. There is never enough. So they have to find ways to make it to up, cutting wages and increasing prices is the obvious way.
An $80 game today is cheaper than $60 games decades ago. There are also a large category of free to play games which didn’t exist before the Internet.
They also don’t have to print games to discs and ship them around the world anymore.
They also don’t have to develop their own engines. Some dude with little to no experience can make a functional game in a few days now. Not to mention functions in UE5 like LOD control do a lot of the work that devs had to handle.
They also have Moore’s Law on their side: The average laptop can now develop what required a $10,000 workstation in 2000.
They also now pack games with microtransactions to make even more money.
They also now sell DLC for games to make more money.
They also now re-release games, which takes a fraction of the effort and still charge a disproportionate price.
Games, objectively, should be cheaper. This is just the hunger for more and more.
Yep, and truth be told if I had the option of paying 90 € for an actual physical copy without microtransactions, DLC instead of having all content in the game from launch, no online access required and no copy protection on the disc, I’d gladly pay that. 100 € even, if it’s a particularly good game.
But I have zero trust in that being the case with the increased prices, it’s just going to be the same thing we now have, more expensively.
Hell ya, I would, too, 100%. Imagine actually owning a game with all of the content on a disk you can share and resell.
I agree with you, though; there is no incentive for companies to do this; they would make less money and have less control over the content. They can’t stand that.
Are the game developers and artists wages now being increased by the same percentage though? You are correct overall, especially in places like the UK where wages have been stagnant since like 2008 it feels like. But letting a company off the hook for raises “due to inflation” if they themselves are not raising their workers salaries to meet that inflation is bullshit.
Good news, wages are no longer stagnant! Minimum wage has started to catch up to many professional jobs at this point. Outside of London anyway.
While wages are an issue, AAA gaming is more about C-suite satisfaction and the continued growth of the capitalist way of life.
Indie devs can make gold for $9.99.
Indie devs can make gold for $9.99.
I’ve spent less than $20 for all of the Vampire Survivors content, and gotten 250 hours of enjoyment out of it.
Sucks to suck, EA.
A big problem is ignorant Csuite scaling up a games developer studio and expecting more cooks in the kitchen will make a higher quality product.
The indie teams make great full experiences with realistic scope because it’s a team of like 20 or less who are all on the same page instead of hundreds of employees.
Wow this is incredible. I get to reuse my meme I just made a few days ago! Now that’s what I call value
Game prices are absolutely a problem still. The price of a game is just the entry fee. Then there’s subscriptions, MTX, etc. If you add in everything you need to make a game a complete experience like they were pre-download era, games cost more even with inflation factored in.
Depend on the game. There are still many single players games that don’t have any MTX etc, Sony first party games are like that, and so are most Nintendo games. Sony often release a DLC, which cost more, but that’s more money for more content, and you don’t need DLC.
Thankfully, that’s true! But looking at the industry as a whole, they’re making far more money than they ever have and the costs of creating physical copies has even decreased significantly since it’s mostly digital now. Games with a heavy focus on online play or that have MTX should cost less, but they never do.
Completely agree, for every case where the increased price may makes sense, there are dozens (if not hundreds) where it makes no sense at all (other than increasing the profit of shareholders, which makes complete sense).
Yeah this is absolutely correct. When you look at prices and adjust for inflation $80 now is about right.
The value of money has gone down, and the value of pay cheques and salaries have not increased to keep up.
Unfortunately this often gets sidelined with “what aboutism” - like what about the dysfunctional AAA market, and predatory big publishers like EA that churn our crap, or all the publishers trying to build microtransactions into games. These are also ALL valid issues, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals that video games cost around $80 in 2000 when adjusted for inflation.
The video game industry can be dysfunctional AND we’re also being screwed over by dysfunctional unequal capitalism causing declining living standards at the same time.
no. they don’t even make physical media anymore. the cost is lowered on each copy. they ask for a ton of extra payments. they can suck shit and die. games can be 30 bucks and still stay profitable. the games industry makes more money than Hollywood. stop defending them while they’re trying to pluck your last dime.
How much did a video game cost to make compared to today?
Same thing with movies. With everything.
We’re not playing polygon tomb raider anymore.
how many copies could they sell back then vs now? how much did it cost to make, stock and ship a physical copy worldwide vs being able to provide infinite copies everywhere only using the bandwidth when necessary?
no one’s asking for billions to be spent on games. companies being horribly managed by businessman who have no idea how games work or what’s important in a game, forcing i live service bullshit, chasing trends, making big empty worlds full of pointless busywork does not mean the games should cost 80 dollars.
ninja theory already proved you can make an insanely good looking game with a tiny budget and sell it for 30 bucks and turn a profit. meanwhile the biggest companies including ones owned by evil billionaires can easily shit out concord and starfields wasting years and millions on steaming turds.
also things haven’t only become more expensive. they’ve become cheaper too. there are more tools, better hardware and software for cheaper if not free that allows people to do more than ever before with less than ever before. the indie scene is 1000x more powerful today than it was back then for this reason.
and you’re talking about polygon tomb raider while these companies are trying to sell you recolored skins for 10 bucks even though it took an unpaid intern about 45 seconds to use a color swap on a 2d texture.
The fact that they’re moving more units doesn’t matter, everything, including things for which the price followed inflation, sells more units than it did 40 years ago just because there’s more people on the planet and globalism is a thing.
What matters is that that money goes to enrich billionaires and not the developers making the product people are buying.
Steam takes a 30% cut on the first $10m in sales (then 25% until $50m and then 20%) and they pay their employees a lot more than industry average and the owner is a multi billionaire with a yacht collection. Same shit for publishers, the c-suites are rich from “managing” the intermediary between the development studio and the retailers, they don’t give a crap about the product as long as it sells.
Meanwhile the devs making the games have a hard time affording housing, need to deal with crunches and get laid off once the game they were working on is completed.
And what about us, the consumers? Well we’re no better off than the developers and we’re still enriching a bunch of billionaires while most of us struggle to afford basic needs.
Both publishers and retailers could afford to reduce their cut and lower prices OR to reduce their cut and leave more money to the people making the products they sell and the impact would only be felt by a handful of people (in Steam’s case, by a single person).
I mean both are the problem, obviously. And they’re both symptoms of tne larger problem, which is late stage capitalism slowly sucking every last drop of labor value out of everyone. Game companies are making more profits than they did 30 years ago, so you can’t tell me they ‘need’ to raise prices. And their CEO salaries are higher than ever, and developer salaries have not risen accordingly to justify the price increase. If a game company said ‘we’re raising our prices from 60 to 90 dollars, but we’re also giving every employee a 1/3 salary increase’ people might not be happy still but it would be a different conversation. But why should people who are struggling have to pay more for nothing except an increase in ‘shareholder value’ and the c-suites salary package? Thats fucked.
I’ve considered this, especially after watching moistcritikal’s very sarcastic rant on the matter. Nowhere in it does he mention the living wages of the devs, artists, and creators of the games, just that the price increase seems insane. Fact is, I remember when a pack of unfiltered camels smokes would run you about 75 cents, and the prices now are near, if not double digits.
Gonna take a lot of work to shift the mindset from “games should never cost more than d dollars” to “we need to develop a financial system whereby inflation doesn’t matter to us”.
Cigarette prices are so high because of the stupidity taxes that government tacks on so people have to pay exorbitant amounts to slowly kill themselves and those in close proximity (and add unneeded stress to our health care system down the road).
Wage stagnation is absolutely heartbreaking.
But even if I were making a livable wage, Nintendo’s prices and other AAA are still ridiculous. The Steam wishlist sale life is the good life.
Game price isn’t a problem, just don’t buy their games.
For £90 you could buy mario cart, or you would start a genocide in Rimworld and still have enough money left over for automated genocide in Factorio and if you are willing to go over by £3.48 you can also commit genocide from orbit in Stellaris.
Stellaris is like $200 if you don’t want features pay-walled from you. And good luck playing a Paradox game the week it comes out - you get to add “Software Tester - Unpaid” to your CV.
RimWorld is $35 so for £90 ($119) you could buy three copies and give them to two friends so you all can make some hats (human leather).
35 years ago I didn’t get a Super Nintendo or Sega because you could get 12 Commodore 64 games for the same price as a single Mario game. And a few years later my dad got hold of a 286 so we could play DOS games like Wolfenstein.
You’re not wrong. I believe I paid $44 for Ultima for the NES back in 89. I’ve personally never paid more than $49 for a game since then. Of course at this point I have like 2500 Steam games I haven’t really played and access to a butt-ton of retro-gaming so I’ll probably never spend more than $49 for a game.
Same with porn. But now, the only fans type sites are ridiculously expensive and you don’t even know what the hell you’re paying for until you pay.
