One way to get out of the video-game industry funk is to recognize that players aren’t spending $70 on most games
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I think the last game I paid full price for was the MGS Collection for PC. Otherwise it’s waiting for sales, usually 75-80% off original price then I buy.
This may sound crazy, but hear me out… $70 might just be relatively cheap right now, when considering historic prices and inflation.
So about 20 years ago, I used to work at a game shop and at that time all new AAA console games were all $50 and I believe the switch to $60 happened just shortly after I left.
That said, a quick web search says that there’s been 65% inflation since 2005. $50 x 1.65 = $82
So at least when compared to other products, $50 to $70 is not a huge price jump.
Now all that said, this does not account for the added cost of micro transactions and paid dlc which didn’t really exist in 2005. So the actual lifetime cost of a top pricing tier game may actually be higher than $70. Honestly, I have more of a problem with that than with the higher base cost, hidden costs are deceptive.
Have you met our lord and saviour, retro gaming?
And the Son, Emulation?
Or the step brother, piracy?
Become a patient gamer. This winter sale, I bought probably 25 games totaling around 30 dollars. It’s enough to keep me busy for the next 5 years.
I set a rule not to buy any game util i finish what I already have. I have not bought anything for the last two years. Any game that interest me is going to my wishlist for now.
This… Put games on your wishlist, set your wishlist to only show sales, and sort by price. Then only buy games from that list when they go on a significant sale. Plenty of decent games out there regularly go for $5-10 or less. With very few exceptions I refuse to pay more than $20-30 for a game and, even then, only if they’re like 50% off and not likely to come down.
Also… stop pre-ordering games. They’ll still be there when they do go on sale. You don’t need to play them as soon as they come out. Conquer that FOMO shit and develop some integrity.
Yep. I’ve been waiting a half a year to get the Dark Souls franchise. It has paid off well.
You don’t even have to be that patient these days. I got Arc Raiders 3 weeks after release for 60% off, it was like $18.
You can go AAA for cheap no problem, people just need to not get FOMO‘d out of their minds and half-resist the compulsion to jump on the next shiny thing immediately.
The newest DOOM is around 27 Euros rn and not even a year old. Buy on release - or worse yet, pre-order - and you‘ll get the worst deal (financially as well as technically).
Game prices are fine for me because I literally just wait until they‘re at a point where I don‘t see them as a waste of money anymore. In the meantime, there‘s 203 untouched games in my Steam library that had reached that price at some point in the past already. Not even mentioning the hundreds of games I got for free between GOG, Prime, and Epic.
On that note, Dark Ages was probably my favorite game I played last year and was worth the cost new as well. For half price, it’s absolutely worth it even more.
Counterpoint: It’s just so much fun when you are starting on release day, not getting spoiled, no one has a clue where what is there is no meta and a lot of community interaction.
E.g. Elden Ring, we started together at 12 am when it launched, killed the first couple of bosses. Then the next few days forums were filled with posts, people had different theories, NPC questlines were being discovered. It was the same two years later with the DLC. A friend of mine bought it finally and started playing last week. But he is .missing all of that.
Basically do the same thing. Until a game hits $20 or less, I won’t purchase it. For $70, I would rather buy something useful like new shoes.
Bring back rentals
Remember Gamefly?
Gamepass wasn’t a bad idea, and it was actually pretty cool when it first came out. It was basically Microsoft’s Gamefly.
Perhaps a privileged take but I’d be completely willing to pay way more for games with no micro transactions or other “live service” BS. Like if economics make it so that it doesn’t make sense to sell most high budget games for $70 without micro transactions then sell me one at $100. Video games were way more expensive when I was a kid and prices haven’t risen with inflation at all. Consider that Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time retailed for $59.99 in 1998 while Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom cost $69.99 in 2023. That is a 16.7% increase over 25 years, or an average increase of 0.619% each year. Meanwhile, average CPI inflation is usually ~2% per year.
The price of new games isn’t a problem for me as they are still cheaper than what they were when I was a kid. In my country Switzerland, an expensive new game is stll less than CHF100.- when some Nes games were CHF120.- thirty years ago. Back in the Playstation 1 era games were around CHF89.- and now most Playstation 5 games are around CHF79.-.
And that’s not taking inflation into account!
Gaming is one of the few things which has become cheaper in my lifetime, especially now that I get a lot of old games on my Steam Deck and only racing sims on my Playstation 5.
For me the problem is that you can pay such an amount and still be subject to many popups begging for your money (microtransactions) or DRM’s (always online or others).
Or that, thanks to digital games, you’ll soon not be able to resell an expensive game that you didn’t enjoy enough to keep.
And also the fact that games aren’t really prettier than 10 years ago but that you still need better hardware to play them.
I think game companies really need to have a look at why their games are becoming so expensive, because I don’t think it’s because they are treating their employees better.
Comrades, I think we found AG bondi.
Video games were way more expensive when I was a kid
They still are, for a kid.
Inflation this, inflation that, but the free money a person has has not increased. It has been going down for quite some time.
Also I’m pretty sure no one in the world is gonna look at a game and go „well if I buy this I’m gonna be homeless for 2 months, but if I plot an excel graph from 1990 to 2026 the price is down so I’ll buy it”
Fucking ag bondi logic if you ask me
Also, micro transaction exist because the poor CEO wants his 23 million salary.
I have kids and I have a huge library of games on Playstation and PC. What are they playing?
Fortnite and Roblox instead, which they could play for free if they didn’t want to get cool skins. So, no, games aren’t as expensive for kids as they used to be, except if they waste a lot of money in predatory schemes in games where they could play for free and just 1-2 things to support the devs.
“My kids are able to play someone else’s games, so games aren’t expensive for kids.”
…did you even read what you just typed?
I haven’t paid over £35 on a game in years. Quite a few games are free now too, though some have kinda scummy cash shops.
No they don’t. For every indie dev who made it there are 100s of software engineers doing some voodoo math 90 hours a week to make my triangle look cool getting paid literally half my salary.
Y’all screech and bitch constantly about an absurdly healthy and competitive industry. It’s tiresome.
That’s what indie games are for, instead of these absurd-budget blockbusters that often aren’t even fun, but also, the world just needs to be cheaper to live in. Games are first on the chopping block because disposable income for entertainment is always the first to collapse.
Last game I paid over €20 was Remnant from the ashes 2, and it was €50 with a whole year of DLC content included. Most of the games announced this week like the sequel to Kena, will buy when they are €20 too. You get the game at a fair price AND actually finished.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake on Switch 2 is only 40 Euros / Dollars instead the full price, because the game is on a Game Key card and not on cart. It is digital only, therefore they give you a discount on price. But why don’t they do that with all digital only games? Also for other stores like Steam?
In Nintendo world, games are generally more expensive in the online store compared to physical cartridges, at least that was the case when I bought my games
But that’s not what I am saying? SquareEnix made the game on release cheaper, because it is on a Game Key card and therefore cheap to produce. It’s only 40 compared to all other stores like Steam, that launched with 80 Euros. My complain is, why don’t they make digital only games cheaper in general, all games and all stores compared to their physical counter part. (I know why, it’s not a real question I ask.)
Games have been $60 since the 90’s and people need to quit bitching about this.
Games were more than $60 in the 90s.
But video games were limited by physical copies back then. Supply was limited, and it cost the publisher multiple dollars, sometimes in the double digits, to manufacture the physical goods to sell. But with that you got a usually complete mostly bug-free game (as in, if there were bugs they usually were not commonly found in normal gameplay), as patches werent really a thing and making physical revisions was expensive. You also got the entire game that you paid for, all the content in the game was available to you from your one purchase. You can lend it to a friend if you want, too.
Nowadays we get sold half of a game that barely works for $70, so you can get the other half by buying the next 14 $20 battlepasses and playing only that one game for the next 5 years to finally get all the content of the game. You also cant let your friend borrow the game.
I don’t need to pay for a dev team that is overbloated with too many people, a marketing team that thinks every ad needs to have a Beatles song, and an executive that just demands more profit. Dev teams need to get smaller, marketing budgets need to shrink, and executives need to be less greedy. They already make record profits, they do not need more.
Just to really put it into perspective: if a Nintendo64 game sold for $55, the developer would usually see a profit of about $6 or $7. Compare that to the immense profit that happens now. Its not even close.
haha, that’s certainly true for your Call of Duties and whatnot. But I will always gladly pay $60-$70 for a mainline Zelda game, especially for the physical copy. I agree that digital copies should be discounted.
60? Maybe. 70? Never until now. 80? Definitely never until now.
And the DLC and “Deluxe” editions… The price of a AAA game is well over $100 now.
Rimworld plus all DLCs is over $100 too, but could last you a literal lifetime in replayability. It’s not the price, but the price per quality content delivered.
true that.
Have they? I’ve seen many games costing up to $100 or more if you want the complete game.
Many standard editions of triple-A games have been chopped to the point where even the proper ending is part of DLC that requires a season pass.
Some design their games in such away that they can sell quality of life features or some kind convenience for players. (Basically subtle form of P2W)
Some have turned their games to billboards for DLC, micro transactions, season passes and even other games.
