Whose decision was it to charge 70-80 usd for a game?
Whose ai investments are buying up all the ram, gpus, and ssds?
Not consumers’…
Seriously. These CEOs need to get their heads out of their asses and open their eyes. My gaming PC is from 2019. My newest machine is lower power than that. A steam deck. And they’ve ruined the steam machine pricing too.
AAA games cost a lot, use basically all the same formulas from the past decade or two, and are expensive to make. They need to target less lofty graphics if they want to sell more copies. Less and less can afford bleeding edge hardware. Now is the time to double down in quality instead of fancy graphics. And this is why they’re losing and indies are thriving.
And don’t forget, everything is digital now, so that $80 game that you’ve completed in 2 weeks can’t be traded for any secondary value.
Still a screamin deal as far as $ per hour of entertainment.
Adjusted for inflation, I paid ~$125.00 CAD for The Legend of Zelda when it launched on NES… For an 8 hr game…
The scale and quality of content delivered today is LIGHT YEARS ahead, and frankly, still the best value proposition in any entertainment media.
That fails to take into account the fact that the gaming was a niche hobby that wasn’t particularly accessible in part due to prices. Given the far far larger market for games and the greater competition for gamer attention you would expect prices to come down.
Prices are set base on what the market is believed to be able to bare however so value per hr or cost to develop are somewhat incidental to the monetisation of a game.
Prices for games have stayed constant for 35 years. Can you think of anything else that has stayed the same price in that time frame?
For real. Nintendo 64 was not a niche hobby, and the games were still 70 to 80 bucks. That’s like $160 in today dollars. It shows, too. We got all this technology, but the care, polish, attention just isn’t there.
I disagree. You’re comparing polishing a marble to polishing the ISS while it’s in orbit.
An N64 game like Ocarina of Time or GoldenEye was a masterpiece, but it fit entirely onto a 32-megabyte cartridge. The entire codebase, every asset, and every line of logic could be held in the heads of a tight team of 15 to 30 people. The constraints were brutal, but they were static.
A modern AAA game is often over 100 gigabytes, that is a 3000x increase in asset data size. You aren’t managing a single, self-contained loop anymore. You are orchestrating the collision of massive, volatile, overlapping systems: real-time global illumination, dynamic physics engines, streaming open-world asset pipelines, complex AI behavior trees, and branching narrative databases. All of this has to run smoothly across vastly different hardware setups, from high end PCs down to consoles.
When people say the “care and polish” isn’t there, they are usually reacting to the friction of this sheer scale, not a lack of effort. In the 90s, if a mechanic broke, one programmer could trace it. Today, a bug might be the result of a physics calculation conflict with an audio asset streaming millisecond late over a network layer. The fact that these massive digital ecosystems even boot up and run at 60 frames per second is an engineering miracle that dwarfs the entire development scope of the 90s. We aren’t getting less care; we are getting infinitely more complexity for effectively half the inflation-adjusted price.
That’s sort of my point… Prices are WAY down. Lower than they have EVER been. $125 for an 8 hr. game. What would that cost today?
All the wealth is being concentrated in the hands of too few people. I’m not going to buy a $120 game when my salary is down, or I’m just laid off.
Problem is becoming a platform where you cant just buy the game anymore. You can obtain a digital licence that they can revoke at any time. So it’s more rent the game. And the price is up. And they have interfered with the studio and development. Plus you also have to pay for gamepass to even launch the game you ‘paid’ for.
This feels like a setup so they can present, “cloud gaming” as a solution. That way they can sell cheap hardware and yearly subscriptions for consistent revenue.
Reminds me of the Sim City 4 launch. The game was always online. People couldn’t play it because their servers couldn’t handle the load. One hiccup in the connection or servers and you’re out of the game. It was single player but you couldn’t play on laptop on a train, or plane.
It’s a not good experience. And if things are like with Stradia you still have to buy the full game and pay the subscription for access. And because you’re paying a subscription, people try to get their money’s worth. That goes against the profit model that assumes you pay full price but only game a few hours per week. So companies start limiting hours per day, add premium tiers, that kind of thing. That’ll cause a lot of resistance, especially with the young crowd with no money but lots of time.
I’m not In that category and don’t begrudge gaming funds…but I still resist as it’s a form of enshittification.
I think you are confusing SimCitys. SimCity 4 came out in 2003. Where there was a SimCity that came out in 2013 that had had those issues. I got a free game out of it, BF3 maybe. But imma be real I don’t remember the SimCity 4 launch, I do recall the SimCity 2013 launched and it was bad. Haven’t bought an EA game since.
Might be. The sim city line and EA are dead to me too, so I don’t remember the version numbers exactly.
I’ve been expecting this for a whilst. It’s what they did for business users. Most office workers pretty much have a glorified tablet.
That’s also a problem, yes. DRM free is best. I’m extremely reluctant to pay for a game I can’t play offline as much as I want. (Barring MMOs and the like, I guess. Don’t play a lot of those, myself)
Well Asha, maybe you should talk to your boss Slopya about that AI problem that’s raising prices on everything.
I mean, unless you play the last four decades of games in emulation… or the couple hundred thousand indie games on steam… or the other few hundred thousand mobile games or…
Oh, you mean your company profits are in crisis. Yeah. Good.
The amount of money the industry blows chasing PR with the tiniest minority of whiny “core gamers” is going to be the downfall of AAA.
The problem is that investors are brain-dead, so Forbes picking up on negative sentiment from 500 neckbeards can legitimately tank a publicly traded publishers stock.
The vast, vast, VAST majority of gamers don’t identify as gamers, don’t play 50 titles a year, and sure as hell don’t engage with gaming media or online discourse about gaming. 95% of games industry revenue is coming from people who don’t give a shit about gamer “hot button topics”.
The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.
These people only care now because it’s actually affecting the bottom line.
Did they care when AAA pricing was lifted to $70 (base) as AAA quality took a nosedive? Did they care when “preordering” turned into “premium”? Did they care when microtransactions made some games into spend-to-win machines?
Hell, most of these clowns don’t even play games. Just more rich people putting on the hat they think they need to get away with a “hello, fellow gamers.”
Maybe the industry has a C-suite crisis.
High quality indie games are very affordable <3
Introducing a monthly subscription for next gen consoles and hiking game pass prices /s
Yar har fiddle de dee
Paying these prices is bullshit, you see!
They don’t deserve all your hard-earned money!
Come be a pirate!
Every industry has an accessibility crisis. Lazy MBAs don’t want to sell products that appeal to everyone if they can sell products that only appeal to rich people with less effort.
Gaming studios have the choice to make stylized visuals instead of chasing hyper realism. They just choose not to.
Stylized games always age best
Gaming, is joining everything else at becoming harder to afford.
🏴☠️
Even past that, you can find sub-$10 quality games all over the various online platforms.
I’m old enough to remember a friend in college blowing $1200 on double-GeForce cards so he could max out specs on Oblivion. And from that perspective, gaming has always been unaffordable. But you don’t have to game like this. Nobody needs to go four figures out of pocket to play Slay the Spire or Dwarf Fortress or even Counterstrike.
Hehe yeah, that is sort of what I meant. Gaming isn’t what changed. Affordability changed.
Ultimately AI is an unaffordable industry. It’ll crash in time, and there’ll hopefully be a whole lot of price drops on ram, graphics, etc. People will not want to stop playing games. The industry has had crashes before and always bounced back bigger than ever.
It will be bad for whoever’s economy is most dependent on it though… And any businesses really heavily invested in it. Won’t it, Microsoft.
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This, too, Shall pass
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Well no but also yes.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that’s $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Also minimum wage was $2.90 ($13.39). Median family income was $19,660 ($90,750.94).
And it was new tech.
So the prices have come down. There are a lot of amazing games that are cheap that you can play basically forever. Minecraft, Dead Cells, Skyrim, etc.
But our expectations have risen while our wages have come down.
So not wrong, but not right for the reasons you’d assume.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that’s $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Dunkey, is that you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q
First time seeing this, watched the whole thing, no lies detected. (Though he didn’t touch on my point about income.)
Bonus: A game you no longer play could still net something on the second-hand market, or maybe you’d trade it with someone. I know there was a group of people at my school that collectively had like two or three copies of the various Pokemon games they’d pass around, exchanging and loaning them on the fly.
Steam Family Sharing is a thing, but not quite so trivial to set up as handing them the cartridge. Never mind about reselling digital copies of games.
How well is she paying her employees?
The CEO is a she, Asha Sharma.
Thanks, I assumed it was the guy on the left on the photo.
