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?
I could’ve sworn there was some girl who was fit …
“People are buying indie games instead and I’m not happy about it”
Not just indie games, every game. Every new game is in competition with every other game in existence. It’s a battle for recognition and attention, winners take all. Brutal situation.
Same goes for books, movies, TV, music.
It’s not: “Gaming is unaffordable.” it’s “People aren’t willing to give us more money.”
I seriously wonder if more competent mobile gaming picks up some of the slack considering the “retro emulator” machines are starting to run PC games via Game Native app. If i didn’t already have a steam deck i would seriously consider one of those devices.
I’m not convinced that we are going to see a renewed push for optimization. I think streaming will be aggressively pushed with low time limits in the forthcoming next gen to “make it affordable.” Xbox was ahead of the curve in that regard.
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.
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
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!
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.
Gaming studios have the choice to make stylized visuals instead of chasing hyper realism. They just choose not to.
Stylized games always age best
