I could’ve sworn there was some girl who was fit …
Introducing a monthly subscription for next gen consoles and hiking game pass prices /s
Sadly that could actually happen at some point.
Already happening with cars and many things so it is inevitable
High quality indie games are very affordable <3
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.
Why would I pay $70 for shit that’s super watered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator when I could pay $20-40 for something made with real passion?
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.
Perhaps making one game per decade is a losing strategey.
Edit: I heard a million excuses for that over the years from AAA industry, but my counter is just pointing to Capcom. Why can they keep up both output and quality?
There was a stretch in the late 90s where squaresoft released a final fantasy nearly every year for 5 years. Now it’s once every 7+ years. I don’t believe it should be that hard to make games these days. There are more people working on the projects, more tools and pre-made engines/libraries available. It’s purely a management/budgeting problem.
The problem is that making games (and software in general) has become more high-level, and enshittification has also gotten rid of highly skilled people. So the top studios in the industry are not capable of making resource-efficient, beautiful games anymore. Not because it’s physically impossible, but because they’re not geared for the processes and decision-making that would allow those games to be made.
When you switch from an artisan mindset to a mass-manufacturing and outsourcing mindset without exercising strict control you eventually become utterly dependent on service and product providers that will see to your costs going up so you’ll keep paying more for less.
All the large studios will come to a breaking point eventually because it’s unsustainable, and will be acquired for the franchise rights by corporations that make their money in unrelated industries. But the PC platform is also breaking down so this might be a moot issue in 10 years from now.
The more the hardware capabilities and our expectations rise, so does the outright complexity of making the games. I’m sure some of us would be fine with less ”bleeding-edge” games if they were otherwise written and designed great, but I think it makes sense, from publisher’s perspective, to hedge the bets and try to also impress with the fidelity of presentation.
If you are looking for a sofa and find one that smells a bit off but is otherwise functional, comfortable and looks nice, you might think you’d be able to live with the smell and buy it.
You almost certainly won’t and will likely regret the choice, but the sale was made and it’s a whole thing to do returns for something so big and hard to transport and move around.
That’s what you want to go for, even if you think it might smell fine. If it looks good enough, it might nor matter if it happened to smell rank ultimately. Numbers must go up!
Hell, I still sometimes boot up old flash games that I enjoyed back when flash was around
I have no idea what your sofa analogy is trying to say.
My friends and I made fun of ff7s terrible graphics when it came out, but the game was so good the bad graphics didn’t matter. Ff16 looked amazing, but the game is so boring it doesn’t matter.
People don’t want bleeding edge from final fantasy, they want a good game.
Bad analogy perhaps. But I mean, sometimes games are shit, but look good, and people buy them due to that. Then the sale is made, even if the game is shit.
Perhaps the smell thing was off, but the sofa breaking right after buying or having sharp spikes under the mattress that poke you if you sit wrong, would not work because things like sofas have warranty for those kind of things. I’d bet smell wouldn’t pass so easily there.
Anyway, point was, good games need not look so pretty and “modern”. Bad games can entice you to buy even if they are bad, if they look good enough. Nothing deeper than that
Why can they keep up both output and quality?
A lot of games produced under the Capcom brand are merely financed by Capcom and developed by smaller studios. Like how GameFreak makes Pokemon games for Nintendo. Clover Studio produces a bunch of indie games under the Capcom banner. Ninja Theory produced several of the Devil May Cry releases. Inti Creates spun out of the old Megaman team to keep turning out new titles when the franchise lapsed. Pragmata was built by a fully independent development team inside Capcom.
And… idk about “quality”. They’re as prone to releasing a flop as anyone. They just turn out a lot of iterative and derivative materials. Why are there 18 different Ace Attorney games over 24 years? Because there’s just not a lot going on between versions, mostly. Same reason the Megaman franchise could turn over so quickly. One basic engine could support a plethora of titles.
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.
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.
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.)
I ONLY buy games when they’re on sale on steam, and they need to be like 60% off for me to even consider it
Use gg.deals or isthereanydeal sites. Both show sales from a kot of 3rd party (legit) sites that redeem on steam (and others but mostly steam).
Very worth using and don’t have to wait for a steam sale.
isthereanydeal can import your steam wishlist, and you can set a price threshold and other criteria on it. I have a $10 threshold on mine and there’s plenty of stuff on there all the time.
they need to be like 60% off
I just buy the game when it gets under $30.
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.
There’s that passive voice, striking again
I have enough that I could go out right now and drop $5k on a new PC build and not have it affect me.
My last mostly full build was in 2016. I’m still on ddr4 ram and just 6 months ago I upgraded my system to a used AMD R 5 5600x processor I got for $150 and an AMD 6600xt GPU I paid $200 for.
I’ll play one of the million older games I haven’t played yet before I ever spend so damned much on a new build or $900 on a console.
It’s like they’re catching onto why the urban legend about drug dealers intentionally poisoning their customers is bullshit. Turns out your sales go down when people can’t buy your product.
It’s interesting how people are finally starting to notice after being told for years this will all eventually come to a head.
