One way to get out of the video-game industry funk is to recognize that players aren’t spending $70 on most games

  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    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.

    • gilokee@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      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.