Unpopular Opinion

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.

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.

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.

Arguably, it's taxes on the wealthy that is the problem. That said. Nintendo can go felate themselves. Greedy, anti emulator dickheads.

I would also like to add that 30 years ago devs had to write the engine and devtools from scratch. Player hardware and optimizations were also massive pain points that needed attention.

I would argue that cost of development has gotten CHEAPER than it was 30 years ago, even when taking the scope of today's games into account. Not to mention the market is also orders of magnitude bigger.

Any schmuk today can take Unity/UE5/Godot and make something playable in a matter of days. Barrier to entry is practically non existent. Look at Palworld, Vampire Survivors, Among Us, Balatro, Terraria. For studios with AAA-level scope look at Larian studios, Warhorse studios, Eleventh hour games, Hello games.

Large studio execs with 0 substance who don't know what they're doing are spouting this inflation drivel as justification to raise prices of their already failing games as AA and indie teams run CIRCLES around them.

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.

There are certain games - like the Grand Theft Auto series - that could easily charge 300 bucks and still offer insane value to the player. Given how many hours a typical person puts into a game like that, the cost per hour ends up being practically nothing. I think game pricing only becomes an issue for people who can’t stay entertained by a single title for more than a few dozen hours before needing to move on to something else.

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.

The problem is throw-away game culture and generally low quality games. A good game can provide you with years of content and would be well worth a >$80 price tag.

But people keep paying the same prices for trash games they play for 2 weeks and then move on. And honestly, they deserve these prices.

Wow this is incredible. I get to reuse my meme I just made a few days ago! Now that's what I call value

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”.

The prices should go down to 40$(or stay 60$ based on inflation) if I dont actually own the game imo. If the company is going to be so bold as to sell "game keys" with no actual data on the cart, coupled with the fact that the EShop has been shut down on the WiiU and 3DS(you can redownload games still, but how long until that goes away?). To me is a huge middle finger, and basically planned obsolesence on the switch 2 since you will no longer be able to redownload your games once they stop supporting the consoles servers.

If i do the "smart" thing and get the switch 2 after a major price drop, every games lifespan will be even shorter. fuck nintendo, mod your switch & switch 2(when thats available) pirate everything from them and get your moneys worth for the overpriced hardware.

There are so many problems with the industry today, but the amount of venom in the discourse around $80 Mario Kart has felt bizarre to me. I do feel that there are much worse problems.

Like it's worth mentioning how a lot of games already are well above $80 after DLC anyway, but I guess those games get a pass? Or just how fucked up most F2P business models are, exploiting whales to subsidize everybody else. I'd rather play a game where everyone pays a fair price than one where addicts are taken advantage of and encouraged to financially ruin themselves.

I don't often buy games at full price myself. Only for a handful of IPs I really love, or multiplayer games I want to get in on the ground floor of, anything else I'll wait for a sale. But the way I see it, if Kirby Air Ride 2 costs $80, I'm willing to spend $80 on that game because I know I will get that much enjoyment out of it. I've waited 22 years for this sequel, it's worth it to me!

And I think ultimately, you gotta just buy the things that are worth it to you, skip the things that aren't, and then chill the fuck out.

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.

Jup, have had that thought before. And i think another Factor is that people now own more games than back then. Making their collection more expensive and equal to that what a few games cost in the past.

So we Always sortoff spend the same part of our budget for games, and only now when the price is rising it takes more out of our budget.

So we feel like the price is rising in an unfair manner .