Word of mouth provided by pirates is still great for the AAA games industry, regardless of what they’ll tell you, and only helps perpetuate these bad practices you’re pirating to get away from. 99.9% of users are unwilling to pirate games, and thus when you reference them, say you played or enjoyed them, talk about pirating them, etc., it’s essentially just free advertising for those games to people who would in all likelihood just purchase them if they wanted them.
Meanwhile, playing indie games gives those devs some cash flow to keep developing and gives free, word of mouth advertising to other people through references, recommendations, etc. The more successful indie games with good practices are, the better the games industry as a whole. It’s not a zero-sum game, but there is some tradeoff involved.
Sorta kinda. We moved to 69.99 for major releases a while ago. Late 2000s in some territories, later in others.
In the US it was 59.99 for the CD era, but it was higher before when cart costs were a massive chunk of the retail price. I bought games that launched at 100 (or its local equivalent) in the 90s, particularly on SNES and N64.
But it’s true that prices have been super stable while moving from expensive carts to cheap CDs and then trivially expensive digital releases. Now there’s no way to cut costs on distribution (you’re already subsidizing storage, it’s just down to bandwidth, which is paid by the retailer anyway). So now inflation is catching up, since none of the money is going to making boxes, stamping CDs or shipping games in trucks. Now when inflation hits there’s no longer a way to hide the pricing impact, so it goes to sticker price.
And people are so used to that stability that they immediately rage on the Internet, if this thread is anything to go by, so the only answer is to hide more of the cost in MTX and dump the sticker price altogether.
Kinda argued against myself there. The real answer isn’t prices will “evenutally” go up, it’s that they will go down to zero and traditional gaming will become mobile gaming. That’s probably more likely.
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Remember when Apple released the $1000 phone and it was a big thing?
Eventually this will be the normal.
I can tell you right now I’m not paying AUD$160 for a new game in the near future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ju_10NkGY
Why pirate shitty AAA games when you can spend your time getting a better experience by supporting indie devs financially and in word of mouth?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/editorials/icons/mobile/000/008/127/Screenshot_2024-02-29_at_3.58.47 AM.jpg
Word of mouth provided by pirates is still great for the AAA games industry, regardless of what they’ll tell you, and only helps perpetuate these bad practices you’re pirating to get away from. 99.9% of users are unwilling to pirate games, and thus when you reference them, say you played or enjoyed them, talk about pirating them, etc., it’s essentially just free advertising for those games to people who would in all likelihood just purchase them if they wanted them.
Meanwhile, playing indie games gives those devs some cash flow to keep developing and gives free, word of mouth advertising to other people through references, recommendations, etc. The more successful indie games with good practices are, the better the games industry as a whole. It’s not a zero-sum game, but there is some tradeoff involved.
I mean… yeah, give it a long enough time and it will be. Kinda how inflation works. “Eventually” is a pretty expansive word.
I’m pretty sure most major games have MSRPd for $60 since the 90s
Sorta kinda. We moved to 69.99 for major releases a while ago. Late 2000s in some territories, later in others.
In the US it was 59.99 for the CD era, but it was higher before when cart costs were a massive chunk of the retail price. I bought games that launched at 100 (or its local equivalent) in the 90s, particularly on SNES and N64.
But it’s true that prices have been super stable while moving from expensive carts to cheap CDs and then trivially expensive digital releases. Now there’s no way to cut costs on distribution (you’re already subsidizing storage, it’s just down to bandwidth, which is paid by the retailer anyway). So now inflation is catching up, since none of the money is going to making boxes, stamping CDs or shipping games in trucks. Now when inflation hits there’s no longer a way to hide the pricing impact, so it goes to sticker price.
And people are so used to that stability that they immediately rage on the Internet, if this thread is anything to go by, so the only answer is to hide more of the cost in MTX and dump the sticker price altogether.
Kinda argued against myself there. The real answer isn’t prices will “evenutally” go up, it’s that they will go down to zero and traditional gaming will become mobile gaming. That’s probably more likely.
Game budgets are crazy. In order to get the profits shareholders want they’ll charge as much as they can get away with.
Indies are actually performing well, so we might see a shift like we saw with film in the 90s.