“People are buying indie games instead and I’m not happy about it”
Yar har fiddle de dee
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.
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.
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 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 a our gamer “hot button topics”.
The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.
Well Asha, maybe you should talk to your boss Slopya about that AI problem that’s raising prices on everything.
Gaming studios have the choice to make stylized visuals instead of chasing hyper realism. They just choose not to.
Stylized games always age best
That CEO has no room to talk about gaming being unaffordable and the industry ignoring the signs, when it’s that very industry that made it unaffordable to begin with.
You can’t claim ignorance of a problem you and your industry directly caused, Asha. You’re as complicit in this as the industry you’re saying is ignoring warning signs.
That’s like if I broke a stick in half in front of a bunch of people, and then tried to say I didn’t break that stick, when everyone saw me break that stick. Stupid analogy, I know, but that’s basically what Asha is trying to pull here.
Hehe “Gaming has become unaffordable”. Continues to buy ram and other component capacity for AI data centers, while actively enshittifying every single game with microtransactions and forced game as a service bullshit. driving customers to increasingly purchase cheaper indie titles that are actually fun.
“Whatever can we do to fix this problem? “ <lays off veteran team so the shareholders can make 5 more Pennie’s a share, causing talent to look at different industries where they aren’t laid off every 2 years, causing every game to be made by devs fresh out of college>.
“This industry isn’t profitable anymore!” <transfers AI investment losses to game division to cover stupid ass speculative investments>
A quick and controversial argument in favor of MTX: MTX allows them to extract more money from those with excess, subsidizing the game for those who can’t afford to pay as much. Sure, when it’s done poorly it’s horrible. It can be a good thing though, like a supporter edition bundle that gives you like an icon next to your name or something.
Budget management should still be the primary option. Does your game need to cost this much to make, such that you have to have insane revenue to make up for it? Could you make something cheaper that’s just as good (if not better, as limitations are the mother of creativity, or however that phrase goes)?
Except it’s a race to the bottom, MTX causes games to be designed around MTX. Instead of rewarding gameplay the design philosophy becomes rewarding purchasing. Which then leads to games designed around gambling triggers. Don’t need to make an entertaining game if you can create an addictive loop.
Which then causes people to give up on gaming and move to other past-times, which means less sales. Which means more aggressive MTX, which leads to the CEO of Microsoft bitching that gaming isn’t profitable enough because of the very problem he himself helped create.
I don’t disagree, when done poorly by industry giants. There are some smaller games that have done it well, as just a way to find development. It isn’t purely bad, and in a world where things are this unaffordable it can be good to keep in mind. Ethical MTX can exist that don’t ruin the experience. It just isn’t what these massive companies want.
Something like the DRG founder’s pack, for example, is pretty good, or the Stationeers DLCs, which add purely optional ways to play that change how things work, which is only really useful to experienced players.
This is it, on so many aspects. And during that they ruined the fun.
It’s like shitting your pants and when everyone calls you out on it, you deny it even though they can all smell it.
Works for the president of the US
I like my ‘breaking a stick’ analogy better, but yeah, that too.
It’s like breaking the stick and then telling the watchers they need more sticks, but they cost too much.
Plenty of good indie or AA games with low system requirements.
All the wealth is being concentrated in the hands of too few people. I’m not going to buy a $120 game when my salary is down, or I’m just laid off.
Problem is becoming a platform where you cant just buy the game anymore. You can obtain a digital licence that they can revoke at any time. So it’s more rent the game. And the price is up. And they have interfered with the studio and development. Plus you also have to pay for gamepass to even launch the game you ‘paid’ for.
This feels like a setup so they can present, “cloud gaming” as a solution. That way they can sell cheap hardware and yearly subscriptions for consistent revenue.
Reminds me of the Sim City 4 launch. The game was always online. People couldn’t play it because their servers couldn’t handle the load. One hiccup in the connection or servers and you’re out of the game. It was single player but you couldn’t play on laptop on a train, or plane.
It’s a not good experience. And if things are like with Stradia you still have to buy the full game and pay the subscription for access. And because you’re paying a subscription, people try to get their money’s worth. That goes against the profit model that assumes you pay full price but only game a few hours per week. So companies start limiting hours per day, add premium tiers, that kind of thing. That’ll cause a lot of resistance, especially with the young crowd with no money but lots of time.
I’m not In that category and don’t begrudge gaming funds…but I still resist as it’s a form of enshittification.
I’ve been expecting this for a whilst. It’s what they did for business users. Most office workers pretty much have a glorified tablet.
That’s also a problem, yes. DRM free is best. I’m extremely reluctant to pay for a game I can’t play offline as much as I want. (Barring MMOs and the like, I guess. Don’t play a lot of those, myself)
Maybe if they would stop burning through all the RAM and shoving AI down our throats…
I’m surprised they haven’t come up with a mandatory paid service where AI finishes your game for you. Just pay for the device. Pay for the game. Pay for online access. Pay for the mods. Pay AI to finish the game…Pay extra for a summary of your achievement’s.
There was an article like a month ago about an AI assistant to play the hard parts for you.
A cross-game AI coop player that doesn’t suck would be kind of cool tho.
That’s what Elon does already.
Lmaoooooo
There have an amazing catalog of affordable games that were launched over the last 25 years (or more). There’s a lifetime of fun available. Gamers may chose to play those, instead of the over expensive new games or worse, subscriptions.
I though “accessibility” in video games meant, like, color blind mode and shit.
Or, you know, do something else than incrementing the version number on your old games while adding nothing new.
Same old games, at a higher price, this might just not cut it.
In the meantime, the Indie games are flourishing.
That’s what the industry has to say, Mr. The CEO… Open your eyes.
– Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
It’s not affordable because of the indie games competition and no market regulations. Where in software there are plenty of regulations and competition is not existent because Office is given for free to schools so children are learning to use Microsoft products.
