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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The $60/$70 price tag on video games from major makers is an entry fee, it doesn’t get you the full game anymore. You have to pay for luxury editions, expansions, microtransactions of some sort, battle pass. It’s cheaper to start a tabletop miniature army than play video games now.
Paying for an expansion to a game you like doesn’t seem like it belongs that list. DLC from the Souls games (Bloodborne included) adds a ton to its respective base games.
There are examples that I can excuse. I’m more of looking at the likes of Destiny 2 or World of Warcraft.
I haven’t spent more than $30ish bucks on a game since … 2013?? I think the last game I paid full price for was gta5 on ps3
Do y’all not know about the bargain bin and steam sales…? Is everyone so up to date on their backlog you can’t wait a few months for that price to drop to 50%
It doesn’t take long, Doom the dark ages has already hit that discount a few times iirc
My friend, let me tell you about this thing called “Pre-order.”
There are plenty of “gotta have it first” people out there. Doesn’t matter if it’s a new phone, game, see a movie on opening day, whatever. Plenty of gamers want to be in Alpha and Beta tests (which FML they do nothing but bitch about as being unplayable) and shell out money for skins and early upgrades or level up packs. Vloggers and tiktokkers too or whatever who want to pull in the views as they play the new games.
These are the people the studios cater to. Not the patient gamers who wait for the product to go on sale 90 days down the road after the initial rush is over.
So as long as the people in the first paragraph exist that’s what the studios will charge.
Games have been $60 forever, $70 is a relative bargain
The games have never been easier to make and the market bigger, fuck their margins
Yeah but the IMPERATIVE IS ON US to make sure that the industry (AAA, AA & Indie) are on their best behaviour.
Like as an example, a game that looks like it would run on potato PC should run on one
Or do not allow a game to cross the recommended requirement of 8 GB ram etc…
Fuck $70+ games.
Where are these statistics from?
SteamDB.
Thanks! That’s a really neat link
Great statement. But why?
Do the math on dollars per hour of entertainment. Games are comparably cheap at first glance. They problem is that people are cheap too. So they won’t pay more for a better profuct. That has led the industry to invent more ways to get your money. Microtransactions, dlc… I would pay $100 for a game like portal these days. It would be less than a dollar per hour enjoyed. And no extra costs. But instead we have thousands of “free” games that are now geared to be most enjoyed by the people who pay the most.That said, today’s games aren’t just a cd in a package. Most require servers running to be played for the most fun. What I would like is more of a subscription to a server provider that pays for servers for all the games. It’s more efficient if you play lots of different games. And a lot less hassle.
Great news!
They are!
… Just typically not the overproduced and overpriced corpo ones.
Wanna drive down AAA game prices?
Stop paying them!
Support your favorite indie or AA game today!
Don’t like games with predatory microtransactions?
You’ll never believe this, but you can also just stop playing games with them!
Get all your friends onboard with the plan, fight the man!
I just played Escape from Ever After. Every bit as good and polished as the old Paper Mario games. $25. They cost $50-$65 back then.
… I’ve never even heard of it.
But I do love the old paper mario games!
So wow, now we have a real life example of actual organic word of mouth spread of a game, as opposed to just being a passive advertisement sponge!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I limit myself to one or two “new full price” purchases a year, and it’s usually games from known devs i want to support that I’m excited about.
I would struggle to find 2 I actually want, but £250 is about what I spent on steam last year, mix of about 15 games and a few expansions. So I guess a bit more money in total but way more games by getting cheaper ones. Looking back there are a few that were probably not really worth buying but perhaps if they get updated in future I might get some more time out of them.
Best advice for myself to follow to avoid disappointments in future I think would be to avoid games near release if I have not enjoyed a similar game from that dev in the past. Sequels to games I enjoyed are consistently good buys, but if its new that has the highest disappointment rate.
I buy a ton of games a year after they release or so. I got the benefit of the expanded edition or whatever and it’s just as much fun for me as it was for everybody else a year or two ago.
Now I play a lot of single player stuff, so your mileage may vary.
I play a mix of single and multi player. But even multiplayer games I only really play ones that have people playing them for years. Gallipoli is probably the largest game I will get on day 1 this year, played their previous 3 WW1 shooters and liked all of them.
Or live with AA and indie games like many of us do, at tell AAA publishers to get fucked by not spending money on their live-service crap.
Every time - every single time - I’ve purchased a major AAA game anywhere close to the release window in the past 10 years, it’s been a mistake. Pay a shitload more for a half baked, buggy, unfinished mess.
At this point I just don’t buy big time releases within 6 months of launch. Even when I’m certain of the game itself, it just ends up being a mistake.
I rarely buy games on release. Recently, ghost of yotei. While I enjoyed the hell out of it, it was shorter than I would have liked and had a very predictable ending. I didn’t feel burned, but I should have waited. The other was the new dragon age. I didn’t pay full price but it was still a lot and I knew within a few hours that it was going to be ass. I pushed through for a few more hours but the soulless writing and lack of weight behind conversations turned me off. I decided to forget it, and play inquisition yet again. Lastly there was forbidden West that I got with my ps5 which was a gift. Don’t regret that one, though it’s not without its flaws. None of them, however, did I find buggy or unplayable.
Have you met our lord and saviour, retro gaming?
And the Son, Emulation?
Or the step brother, piracy?
The only problem is too much choice!
Seriously, when you’ve got thousands of ROMs and vintage PC games to choose from, it’s really difficult to land on one to play right now!
I went down a rabbit hole of emulation last year. I got PCSX2 and tons of games like Ratchet & Clank, Tak 1-3, Jak 1-X, the Sly series, Spider-Man 2, and so many others. I spent a good month and a half just playing old PS2 games and I had an absolute blast
Nice! I’ve been gradually playing through a bunch of NES classics: Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, Blaster Master, Fire Emblem. The next game I want to go through is Castlevania 1 and then Ultima IV after that!
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.
Just don’t buy Triple A titles.
The last “AAA” title I bought was elden ring for 30$ (unless you count Silk Song)
There are plenty of indie style, A or AA studios that are in the 5-30$ range.
The more people who move over to that type of mindset and buy from small titles, the more apt that large companies are going to lower their prices.
Retail price doesn’t even matter anyways. It’s more a placeholder to make sales seem more impressive with X% off to make people feel they are getting a bargain.
