The president of Capcom can lick the wrinkles out of my sweat steamed scrotum if he thinks I’m buying another Capcom game after this.
Yeah, games cost more to make than they did on the SNES.
But theres also an absolutely massively bigger customer base buying more games than ever before. So if your big name games are failing to bring in big numbers, that sounds like you and your fellow executives need to step down and let someone who knows what customers actually want run the company. But I bet that thought never crossed his fuckin mind.
Just to add to what you mentioned, Capcoms Street Fighter 6 in my region on steam is $100 AUD, assuming you don’t want the deluxe or ultimate editions (Not that the store page bothers to explain the differences}. On top of that you can buy the Year 1 character pass for $45 which adds 4 characters. The ultimate pass for $75 which adds the previously mentioned characters and some cosmetics for those 4 characters. The soundtrack for $50 holy shit that’s an expensive soundtrack.
And on top of all that you can buy the games in game currency, fighter coins. Which are used to unlock costumes and characters including classic costumes. Wanna buy a character? You’ll never be able to buy just the right amount of coins, coz fuck you give us money.
It’s bad enough these people want to raise prices whilst making record breaking profits, but they monetize their games in so many different and often scummy ways on top of the purchase price.
I want to say thats an example of out of touch executives.
But we both know predatory practices like that wouldnt have gotten this far if there wasnt a plethora of short sighted idiots out there, with more money than sense, refusing to do without their instant gratification and, as a result, not only throwing literally mountains of money at predatory companies, but actively complaining online about how they wish they could get even more financially exploited.
I actually agree with him, and I am not an employee of the gaming industry. In the mid 90s N64 carts were freaking $79.99 at one point early on! I realize part of this is because the carts were expensive, but even CD based games were not THAT far behind at $49.99 or $59.99 as I recall. I realize they don’t have the same physical distribution costs, but game prices really have not kept up with inflation. Growing up it was a big freaking deal to get a new NES game you damn well better learn to love it, like it or not haha. Now… games are generally much more affordable for the average family, plus if you just wait a bit and don’t buy on release (barring Nintendo 1st party titles) they are way cheaper!
if you dropped game to $30 from $60, would double or more people buy it? or would too many people see the lower price and think it must be a shitty game to be ‘that low’ and pass on it?
People made that point about Hollow Knight. At $15, people will assume it’s poor quality or a short game, when it actually has tons of content and is better quality than most AAA games. HK is a rare example of a game that’s too cheap.
Imo the best example of an underpriced game is Terraria. The game stayed 10$ for the longest time, had a decade of updates(not just tiny ones), ridiculous hours of playtime and people even complained the devs were “greedy” when they increased the price of a steam sale of it(which the game is still an unbelievably good value)
They’re actually currently working on the final final final final final final update, Every update from 1.4.0.1 through 1.4.5 were all supposed to be the final updates lol.
“We super mean it this time guys…” - Cenx, the creative director of Terraria
Or… maybe development costs have just gotten stupidly high? There are a lot of great indie games for a few bucks that pack a heck of a lot more fun and experimentation than a lot of the cookie cutters garbage coming out of a lot of big studios lately. I’m honestly sick of every facet of my life trying to bleed me dry of any spare cent I get.
I just recently played Hrot, and it has been one of my favorite shooters to come out as of late. A game made by a Czech dude in a custom engine that he wrote for $16.00. I’ll play four separate games like that before I spend $70.00 for many competing AAA games out there. Not that high budget games shouldn’t have a place, but sometimes less can be more.
Even the most terrible AAA games sell millions of copies these days. They more than make their money back with each one, the margins are slimmer but the volume is magnitudes higher than ever. Cry me a river.
This exact thought (volume) occurred to me when I saw the headline. They like to say that the price of games hasn’t increased in line with inflation, but I’d be interested to know how big the market was in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today. I’d bet the market is orders of magnitude bigger today.
And the profitability has skyrocketed. The videogame industry is now one of the largest insudtries on the planet. A big driver has been normalisation of after-purchase items. Console players now pay to unlock their collar to the internet (ps+ and XBlive). Microtransactions add to this, and now battlepasses want $10+ every 50-90 days. Lootboxes normalizing near-gambling with overwatches success was a huge bar-lift in profitability expectations for shareholders.
Special editions are also hitting $90 and higher, plus those other expenditures. Ask “the gamers tm” and they’ll tell you you have to buy a special edition for $120 or you’re not a real fan anyway. Starfield has a $300 version. The Digital Premium doesn’t even come with the GAME! It’s another $35 after you already gave Microsoft $70.
Additionally, the work to make a new game has decreased. Assets are able to be salvaged from one engine to the next reducing the amount of work to make a game in UE6 after it was on UE5. the workforce has matured and can be taught as a class so there’s not nearly as many “self taught” making half a game. Roller Coaster Tycoon was made almost entirely by one dude. Obviously re-using assets is smart. But then to say you “built the game from the ground up” is false. Elden Ring was even praised for it
Marketing budgets have fuckin EXPLODED. A “Rule of Thumb” for indie devs is to spend HALF your budget on just marketing. Destiny allegedly spent 2.5× what they spent on development, for marketing. Publishing studios didn’t used to spend this much. “For every dollar on the game, spend another .25 to .50 on marketing”
Buying power has gone DOWN since ps1. You think I’m joking but federal minimum wage in the US is still 7.25. In 1994 (launch of ps1). It was 4.25 - adjusted for inflation thats $8.43. Meaning if you made minimum wage then, you’d be making more than minimum wage now, effectively. People are fucking broke and game companies want MORE money for games.
In 1994 when you bought a PS1 game you got THE WHOLE GAME. That was it. There was no merch drop pip-boy for the special edition. There was no Day-One patch. There was no “pay to get multiplayer”. There was no in-game shop to buy skins for the characters. All these features were intentionally cut to resell to consumers post-launch.
Games cost less to make now, but budgets went up. Buying power is down. Please stop defending corporate bullshit excuses about wanting more money, forever.
It was a specific example to show how AAA games reuse assets, not mtx. A low hanging fruit of that could be like…any sports game.
A similar example of good reuse could be EA and a specific Female Character Mesh they’ve had for awhile and they just keep reusing her. The photo example I found searching was Falck from BF 2042. Her hitbox and mesh is in Battlefront 2, as a First Order officer; and in Battlefield 5.
I dont outright hate reuse of things here and there - it saves money and time.
I’d be curious comparing these prices to median income or median disposable income. I’m guessing it tracks those numbers much closer than inflation, which wages haven’t kept pace with.
This drives me crazy every time I see it so I’m glad to see others recognizing this. Yes game production has gone up, but the market has massively increased. Your costs are fixed; doesn’t matter if you sell 10,000 copies or 10,000,000. More people are gaming than ever so when I see all these attempts to squeeze more money from consumers to address rising costs I have no sympathy for the publisher.
The problem that they’re not considering is that if they raise the prices, more people are going to be priced out of buying the games, and will resort to piracy. The cost of living is absurd right now, and I can only afford a handful of $60 games a year.
I’m not going to argue the ethics of piracy, because the point is that a lot of people will do it if they otherwise cannot afford to buy games. Also, some games just never really go down in price, especially if you’re talking nintendo. To this day Breath of the Wild is still $60 if bought new or digitally.
Or, hear me out, we cut out the most expensive part of game development.
Upper management. They cost the most, contribute the least (if anything), and can be replaced by someone who not only take 25% of what some of these CEOs make, but do a better job.
The AAA market seems to be chasing a business model that isn’t there any more. I don’t know why game developers still chase photo realism, it isn’t what makes money.
There are still good AAA releases, it’s just that 95% of AAA games are not worth the price.
I would argue the old business model still works, it’s just that most AAA games studios don’t follow that model anymore. Back in the day, a full priced game didn’t have DLC or MTX, was an actual complete game, and focused more on the fun than the profit making. Games tried new ideas, they innovated instead of chasing whatever fad is popular at the time. It’s the modern AAA game business model that is the problem and doesn’t work anymore.
If 95% of the games aren’t worth the price, then there is something wrong with that business model.
Yeah, a full priced game might not have had DLC or MTX, but it was more expensive adjusting for inflation and didn’t have nearly the quantity or quality of in game assets as current games do.
And old games definitely chased fads, they were just different fads at the time fed in part by the differences in game economics.
This is all software, companies keep finding excuses to tack on “features” that increase development cost which eventually lead to necessary price increases.
In the professional world you will rarely ever hear project managers and leaders ask the question “would our customers rather pay extra for feature X or save money by sticking to their simpler feature set?” This is because development is nearly always started with the long term goal of incorporating a feature into the product to increase the overall “value” of the product. This increased “value” of the product then means that the company should charge more for it.
Not to mention until it’s actually photo-realistic, it looks uncanny. It’s better to find a style and use that than to chase realism imo. But then again, these AAA games just add a bunch of foliage, some god rays, maybe a sprinkle of rain and people are oooh, aaah-ing and coughing up their cash.
Game prices are already pushing $100+ when you factor in season passes, special editions, and microtransactions. Basically every AAA game has some combo of all of these.
I don’t think he’s wrong. AAA game prices have been basically the same for 20+ years, while the cost of making games has only gone up. I think this is why a lot of publishers push for progressively more aggressive microtransactions, which can often hide the actual price of the game’s content. And greed but that’s kind of their job.
The idea that BG3 and Overwatch 2 released at the same price point is actually ludicrous. With AAA games, the price is standard and if you don’t like the game, oh well fuck you. And I would absolutely pay extra for games from developers which invested more, and had a higher standard of quality. Larian could charge $100 for their next CRPG and I’d be all in. Similarly, I don’t think minimally viable cash grab titles or smaller, maybe more experimental titles should release for more than like $30.
I think the indie scene does this pretty well but it’s a challenge for AAA, and consumers are somewhat to blame. I think people would balk more at an $80 standard price than a $60 half-complete game with $4k of microtransactions. So of course, studios are going to go with the latter strategy, even though plenty of people hate it.
AAA wouldn’t remove macrotransactions to counter the higher price, they would just charge more for the game and keep everything the same. The current generation has been conditioned by mtx, it’s no longer a whale problem. it’s a norm that the average consumer accepts and buys into, which has fucked the industry.
Overwatch was priced at $40 on launch, it was just multiplayer after all. They priced it brilliantly and the mtx they had were pointless and non-invasive, a far cry to what that game has devolved into these days. Overwatch ‘2’ was a forced patch which turned the game free-to-play and added all the aforementioned cancer mtx.
BG3 is $60, without any mtx. So I don’t really understand the point you are making at all, it is just false that they were priced the same, BG3 didn’t need to cost more, if it’s cheaper it’s more accessible to more people and the volume of sales makes up for the lower price, don’t forget (like they want you to) there are a LOT more people playing and buying games now than 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Games are half-baked because people’s standards have dropped and they will just buy half-baked shit, people still pre-order digital games… or they buy special editions to let them play the game 3 days early or whatever, the situation we are in is the fault of mindless consumption, not the fact game prices haven’t significantly increased.
Until AAA games can remove the predatory monetisation, and gain our trust back, we should not be agreeing to be charged more. These companies aren’t struggling, they are turning over record profits. Support indie developers, fuck AAA.
What this CEO and you conveniently forget is the fact, that there are more Games sold every year. Since those are digital goods and copy costs are near zero, those companies are making more money each year already. They also pretty much killed the ability to sell used Games, except for Console Games with a physical medium.
Also: why should the consumers have to pay for the ballooning Overhead that those companies have? Don’t tell me you need a hundred million dollars in your marketing department to sell a GOOD/GREAT game. That is Bullshit.
I’ve never understood why people defend this mentality. Ballooning development costs? Last I checked half of the triple A games that get released spent just as much on marketing as fucking development. Not to mention Video Game revenue has been increasing year on year.
Also fuck these people because how often does this shit release with extra “monetisation” like on top of trying to make games more expensive they also throw in tons of microtransactions, loot boxes and battle passes, platform exclusive content, pre-order exclusive content etc.
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The president of Capcom can lick the wrinkles out of my sweat steamed scrotum if he thinks I’m buying another Capcom game after this.
Yeah, games cost more to make than they did on the SNES.
But theres also an absolutely massively bigger customer base buying more games than ever before. So if your big name games are failing to bring in big numbers, that sounds like you and your fellow executives need to step down and let someone who knows what customers actually want run the company. But I bet that thought never crossed his fuckin mind.
Just to add to what you mentioned, Capcoms Street Fighter 6 in my region on steam is $100 AUD, assuming you don’t want the deluxe or ultimate editions (Not that the store page bothers to explain the differences}. On top of that you can buy the Year 1 character pass for $45 which adds 4 characters. The ultimate pass for $75 which adds the previously mentioned characters and some cosmetics for those 4 characters. The soundtrack for $50 holy shit that’s an expensive soundtrack.
And on top of all that you can buy the games in game currency, fighter coins. Which are used to unlock costumes and characters including classic costumes. Wanna buy a character? You’ll never be able to buy just the right amount of coins, coz fuck you give us money.
It’s bad enough these people want to raise prices whilst making record breaking profits, but they monetize their games in so many different and often scummy ways on top of the purchase price.
I want to say thats an example of out of touch executives.
But we both know predatory practices like that wouldnt have gotten this far if there wasnt a plethora of short sighted idiots out there, with more money than sense, refusing to do without their instant gratification and, as a result, not only throwing literally mountains of money at predatory companies, but actively complaining online about how they wish they could get even more financially exploited.
Every company executive has gotten way too big for their fucking britches. I’m pirating shit again, fuck all of these greedy mother fuckers.
You’re literally taking yachts away from someone’s children! Why can’t you think of the board’s children?!
I actually agree with him, and I am not an employee of the gaming industry. In the mid 90s N64 carts were freaking $79.99 at one point early on! I realize part of this is because the carts were expensive, but even CD based games were not THAT far behind at $49.99 or $59.99 as I recall. I realize they don’t have the same physical distribution costs, but game prices really have not kept up with inflation. Growing up it was a big freaking deal to get a new NES game you damn well better learn to love it, like it or not haha. Now… games are generally much more affordable for the average family, plus if you just wait a bit and don’t buy on release (barring Nintendo 1st party titles) they are way cheaper!
Prices have mostly been decided by minimum wage. If you want a million people to buy your game, you need a million people to have $60 they can spare.
if you dropped game to $30 from $60, would double or more people buy it? or would too many people see the lower price and think it must be a shitty game to be ‘that low’ and pass on it?
People made that point about Hollow Knight. At $15, people will assume it’s poor quality or a short game, when it actually has tons of content and is better quality than most AAA games. HK is a rare example of a game that’s too cheap.
I definitely feel like team cherry spoiled us, and we still owe them for creating that game at that price
Imo the best example of an underpriced game is Terraria. The game stayed 10$ for the longest time, had a decade of updates(not just tiny ones), ridiculous hours of playtime and people even complained the devs were “greedy” when they increased the price of a steam sale of it(which the game is still an unbelievably good value)
Poor devs, they don’t know how to stop updating their game.
This made me laugh because I remember the “final update” was a few patches ago.
They’re actually currently working on the final final final final final final update, Every update from 1.4.0.1 through 1.4.5 were all supposed to be the final updates lol.
“We super mean it this time guys…” - Cenx, the creative director of Terraria
I was with you until the last sentence.
Well, yeah. It’s a CLASSIC now! I wouldnt go under $20k!
Or… maybe development costs have just gotten stupidly high? There are a lot of great indie games for a few bucks that pack a heck of a lot more fun and experimentation than a lot of the cookie cutters garbage coming out of a lot of big studios lately. I’m honestly sick of every facet of my life trying to bleed me dry of any spare cent I get.
I just recently played Hrot, and it has been one of my favorite shooters to come out as of late. A game made by a Czech dude in a custom engine that he wrote for $16.00. I’ll play four separate games like that before I spend $70.00 for many competing AAA games out there. Not that high budget games shouldn’t have a place, but sometimes less can be more.
Even the most terrible AAA games sell millions of copies these days. They more than make their money back with each one, the margins are slimmer but the volume is magnitudes higher than ever. Cry me a river.
This exact thought (volume) occurred to me when I saw the headline. They like to say that the price of games hasn’t increased in line with inflation, but I’d be interested to know how big the market was in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today. I’d bet the market is orders of magnitude bigger today.
Not to mention the price of games has increased. See micro transactions and dlc.
Prices of video games and consoles have actually declined over time when accounting for inflation.
https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/cost-of-gaming-since-1970s
Here’s an example:
PlayStation 1
Cost at Launch (1995): $299.99 Cost Today (2020): $509.19 Average Game Cost (1995): $49.99 Average Game Cost (2020): $84.85
PlayStation 2
Cost at Launch (2000): $299.99 Cost Today (2020): $450.64 Average Game Cost (2000): $49.99 Average Game Cost (2020): $75.09
AAA titles going to $90 would actually be putting them back to PS1 and earlier pricing.
Yeah but in PS1 days those prices got you the full game.
And the profitability has skyrocketed. The videogame industry is now one of the largest insudtries on the planet. A big driver has been normalisation of after-purchase items. Console players now pay to unlock their collar to the internet (ps+ and XBlive). Microtransactions add to this, and now battlepasses want $10+ every 50-90 days. Lootboxes normalizing near-gambling with overwatches success was a huge bar-lift in profitability expectations for shareholders.
Special editions are also hitting $90 and higher, plus those other expenditures. Ask “the gamers tm” and they’ll tell you you have to buy a special edition for $120 or you’re not a real fan anyway. Starfield has a $300 version. The Digital Premium doesn’t even come with the GAME! It’s another $35 after you already gave Microsoft $70.
Additionally, the work to make a new game has decreased. Assets are able to be salvaged from one engine to the next reducing the amount of work to make a game in UE6 after it was on UE5. the workforce has matured and can be taught as a class so there’s not nearly as many “self taught” making half a game. Roller Coaster Tycoon was made almost entirely by one dude. Obviously re-using assets is smart. But then to say you “built the game from the ground up” is false. Elden Ring was even praised for it
Marketing budgets have fuckin EXPLODED. A “Rule of Thumb” for indie devs is to spend HALF your budget on just marketing. Destiny allegedly spent 2.5× what they spent on development, for marketing. Publishing studios didn’t used to spend this much. “For every dollar on the game, spend another .25 to .50 on marketing”
Buying power has gone DOWN since ps1. You think I’m joking but federal minimum wage in the US is still 7.25. In 1994 (launch of ps1). It was 4.25 - adjusted for inflation thats $8.43. Meaning if you made minimum wage then, you’d be making more than minimum wage now, effectively. People are fucking broke and game companies want MORE money for games.
In 1994 when you bought a PS1 game you got THE WHOLE GAME. That was it. There was no merch drop pip-boy for the special edition. There was no Day-One patch. There was no “pay to get multiplayer”. There was no in-game shop to buy skins for the characters. All these features were intentionally cut to resell to consumers post-launch.
Games cost less to make now, but budgets went up. Buying power is down. Please stop defending corporate bullshit excuses about wanting more money, forever.
The article you linked for elder ring (a game with no micro-transactions) talked about re-using assets from that game.
As in it was built from the ground up but reused in the game.
It was a specific example to show how AAA games reuse assets, not mtx. A low hanging fruit of that could be like…any sports game.
A similar example of good reuse could be EA and a specific Female Character Mesh they’ve had for awhile and they just keep reusing her. The photo example I found searching was Falck from BF 2042. Her hitbox and mesh is in Battlefront 2, as a First Order officer; and in Battlefield 5.
I dont outright hate reuse of things here and there - it saves money and time.
The article said it re-used assets in the game that were made for that game and that game alone.
I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with what you said, I’m just repeating information from the article you posted.
I’d be curious comparing these prices to median income or median disposable income. I’m guessing it tracks those numbers much closer than inflation, which wages haven’t kept pace with.
deleted by creator
That’s not what I asked though. Irrelevant information because we don’t know the economies of scale at play.
Well distribution is basically entierly free at this point so more customers is just directly more money.
This drives me crazy every time I see it so I’m glad to see others recognizing this. Yes game production has gone up, but the market has massively increased. Your costs are fixed; doesn’t matter if you sell 10,000 copies or 10,000,000. More people are gaming than ever so when I see all these attempts to squeeze more money from consumers to address rising costs I have no sympathy for the publisher.
The problem that they’re not considering is that if they raise the prices, more people are going to be priced out of buying the games, and will resort to piracy. The cost of living is absurd right now, and I can only afford a handful of $60 games a year.
Why resort to piracy, just wait for next years 75% discount. It even comes with all the bugfixes.
I’m not going to argue the ethics of piracy, because the point is that a lot of people will do it if they otherwise cannot afford to buy games. Also, some games just never really go down in price, especially if you’re talking nintendo. To this day Breath of the Wild is still $60 if bought new or digitally.
Cyberpunk:
Are games just buggy at launch so pirates don’t have a good experience
Cut back on graphics, and I mean this unironically
Or, hear me out, we cut out the most expensive part of game development.
Upper management. They cost the most, contribute the least (if anything), and can be replaced by someone who not only take 25% of what some of these CEOs make, but do a better job.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/the-games-industrys-highest-earning-ceos-listed-in-new-report/
Cutting out middle management is always the right answer
Or maybe don’t make expensive games.
The AAA market seems to be chasing a business model that isn’t there any more. I don’t know why game developers still chase photo realism, it isn’t what makes money.
Yeah they always ask “Why won’t people pay $100 for our video game?” and not “How about we DON’T spend $100,000,000 making ONE video game?”
Remember when Microsoft burned $500,000,000 and still couldn’t make a decent Halo game
There are still good AAA releases, it’s just that 95% of AAA games are not worth the price.
I would argue the old business model still works, it’s just that most AAA games studios don’t follow that model anymore. Back in the day, a full priced game didn’t have DLC or MTX, was an actual complete game, and focused more on the fun than the profit making. Games tried new ideas, they innovated instead of chasing whatever fad is popular at the time. It’s the modern AAA game business model that is the problem and doesn’t work anymore.
If 95% of the games aren’t worth the price, then there is something wrong with that business model.
Yeah, a full priced game might not have had DLC or MTX, but it was more expensive adjusting for inflation and didn’t have nearly the quantity or quality of in game assets as current games do.
And old games definitely chased fads, they were just different fads at the time fed in part by the differences in game economics.
This is all software, companies keep finding excuses to tack on “features” that increase development cost which eventually lead to necessary price increases.
In the professional world you will rarely ever hear project managers and leaders ask the question “would our customers rather pay extra for feature X or save money by sticking to their simpler feature set?” This is because development is nearly always started with the long term goal of incorporating a feature into the product to increase the overall “value” of the product. This increased “value” of the product then means that the company should charge more for it.
I am ranting now.
Not to mention until it’s actually photo-realistic, it looks uncanny. It’s better to find a style and use that than to chase realism imo. But then again, these AAA games just add a bunch of foliage, some god rays, maybe a sprinkle of rain and people are oooh, aaah-ing and coughing up their cash.
Game prices are already pushing $100+ when you factor in season passes, special editions, and microtransactions. Basically every AAA game has some combo of all of these.
Capcom President salary is ‘Too High’
Ahhahah
lmao
I don’t think he’s wrong. AAA game prices have been basically the same for 20+ years, while the cost of making games has only gone up. I think this is why a lot of publishers push for progressively more aggressive microtransactions, which can often hide the actual price of the game’s content. And greed but that’s kind of their job.
The idea that BG3 and Overwatch 2 released at the same price point is actually ludicrous. With AAA games, the price is standard and if you don’t like the game, oh well fuck you. And I would absolutely pay extra for games from developers which invested more, and had a higher standard of quality. Larian could charge $100 for their next CRPG and I’d be all in. Similarly, I don’t think minimally viable cash grab titles or smaller, maybe more experimental titles should release for more than like $30.
I think the indie scene does this pretty well but it’s a challenge for AAA, and consumers are somewhat to blame. I think people would balk more at an $80 standard price than a $60 half-complete game with $4k of microtransactions. So of course, studios are going to go with the latter strategy, even though plenty of people hate it.
Consumers don’t set prices and if he can’t convince people his games are worth more, that’s on Capcom’s marketing team.
This just smacks of “we’ve tried nothing and nothing is working.”
AAA wouldn’t remove macrotransactions to counter the higher price, they would just charge more for the game and keep everything the same. The current generation has been conditioned by mtx, it’s no longer a whale problem. it’s a norm that the average consumer accepts and buys into, which has fucked the industry.
Overwatch was priced at $40 on launch, it was just multiplayer after all. They priced it brilliantly and the mtx they had were pointless and non-invasive, a far cry to what that game has devolved into these days. Overwatch ‘2’ was a forced patch which turned the game free-to-play and added all the aforementioned cancer mtx.
BG3 is $60, without any mtx. So I don’t really understand the point you are making at all, it is just false that they were priced the same, BG3 didn’t need to cost more, if it’s cheaper it’s more accessible to more people and the volume of sales makes up for the lower price, don’t forget (like they want you to) there are a LOT more people playing and buying games now than 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Games are half-baked because people’s standards have dropped and they will just buy half-baked shit, people still pre-order digital games… or they buy special editions to let them play the game 3 days early or whatever, the situation we are in is the fault of mindless consumption, not the fact game prices haven’t significantly increased.
Until AAA games can remove the predatory monetisation, and gain our trust back, we should not be agreeing to be charged more. These companies aren’t struggling, they are turning over record profits. Support indie developers, fuck AAA.
What this CEO and you conveniently forget is the fact, that there are more Games sold every year. Since those are digital goods and copy costs are near zero, those companies are making more money each year already. They also pretty much killed the ability to sell used Games, except for Console Games with a physical medium.
Also: why should the consumers have to pay for the ballooning Overhead that those companies have? Don’t tell me you need a hundred million dollars in your marketing department to sell a GOOD/GREAT game. That is Bullshit.
I’ve never understood why people defend this mentality. Ballooning development costs? Last I checked half of the triple A games that get released spent just as much on marketing as fucking development. Not to mention Video Game revenue has been increasing year on year.
Also fuck these people because how often does this shit release with extra “monetisation” like on top of trying to make games more expensive they also throw in tons of microtransactions, loot boxes and battle passes, platform exclusive content, pre-order exclusive content etc.