Oblivion was The first AAA game to have microtransactions and now Oblivion Remastered could possibly be the last AAA game to be priced at $50-60 dollars.
with the Switch 2 being a success, we could see a rise in prices for all AAA Games. to 80-90 dollars
WHEN games do inevitably become 80-100 dollars, I’ll definitely be buying more Indie games
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pirating games is the only way to go… they just cost too damn much for what is almost always very little actual value, in my opinion. So very few games actually hold my attention for more than a couple hours and I’m sure as shit not going to give someone $30+ for that. on the off-chance a game grips me and sucks me in then i definitely will go buy it on steam because i feel like that’s fair, but i’m not going to do that if they’re $90
one good thing of not feeling fear of missing out is that i never buy games on release and always grab them on the cheap a year or 2 later on a sale. There is literally way too much good games out there.
with the Switch 2 being a success, we could see a rise in prices for all AAA Games. to 80-90 dollars. WHEN games do inevitably become 80-100 dollars, I’ll definitely be buying more Indie games
95% of modern games especially AAA titles for switch/consoles are pure, unabashed simulacra. Why pay 80 dollars for a game that is the less authentic version of things that came out 5-20 years ago?
You can always just go touch the green stuff
This is why I’m gunna’ try to catch all the 'mons in gen 3 this summer.
whats your plan for the gen 2 starters? colloseum or completing the emerald national dex 3 times
Games were standardized to $60 back around 2005. Prior to that, games were just whatever the price that publishers decided the game should be. Chrono Trigger cost $80 USD at launch in 1995: https://fantasyanime.com/squaresoft/ctabout.htm Adjusting for inflation, that would be just shy of $170 USD now. It was not uncommon for games for the Nintendo 64 to retail for $70-80: https://retrovolve.com/n64-games-were-ridiculously-expensive-when-they-first-came-out/
Video games (particularly console and handheld games) have always been an expensive hobby. Games also haven’t been adjusted for inflation in the 20 years since prices were largely standardized, which is why they have become a microtransaction hell.
Honestly, this will likely lead the the return of video game demos. Because video games were prohibitively expensive in the 80s and 90s, demos were a huge part of the culture so that you could try them out ahead of time to get a feel for if they were worth the price tag.
I think they became a microtransaction hell when mobile games showed you could charge them and make a shit load of money
It would have happened regardless. The cost of production has increased while the price of the product itself has ostensibly gone down. Like I said, adjusted for inflation, Chrono Trigger would have cost roughly $170 USD. Yes, the cost of cartridge production was relatively expensive, but that’s only a portion of the overall production cost for the game. At its peak, that dev team only had like 200 developers, and that was only during part of the development. Compare that to something like an Assassin’s Creed title that has 2-3x that sized team for most of the life of development.
With the costs of development increasing and the cost of the game itself remaining stagnant, it was only a matter of time. People wonder what happened to all the middleware games that existed in the 90s and early 00s. This is why they died out. Companies can’t afford to take risks on titles because of ballooning production costs, so they stick to churning out recognizable IPs. tbh, they should have raised the prices a long time ago.
That’s true, but you also have to take into account the absolute value of a game. How much is a game worth for the average person? Better graphics are a diminishing return, I’m having a blast playing indie games with ps1/2 graphics. Here I can buy a movie ticket for less than 10 € (around 8 I think), this mean that I can buy a game or watch 10-12 movies.
Timethe switch 2 will tell. And even if Nintendo can do it, they’ll try that on pc and I don’t think they’ll be able to replicate it.
Every year, there are more games that are made than you could play through in an entire lifetime.
The entire gaming industry is propped up on a gigantic bandwagon, the idea that you have to play the new releases that other people are playing. Old games are much cheaper, sometimes even free. If everyone realized that and just dug around for what they liked, we would never have any shortage of games to play.
very true. a bunch of years ago I was suddenly too broke to stay on the bandwagon and fell off for a few years.
I got into that whole “patient gamer” community, where people would stumble across 5+ year old games on deep discount and share those titles.
nowadays I am on surer footing, but see no reason to chase the eternal hype wagon. not only are older games cheaper, they don’t require me to upgrade my shit and any stability or compatibility issues are long sorted.
I just got Far Cry 4 for $5. it’s pretty fun and runs great lol.
meanwhile my gaming friends–who game are all fucked financially–and are tripping all over themselves to give what little cash they have to these asshole companies for hardware upgrades and/or to download buggy betas and spend the afternoon trying to to get all the cutting edge DRM and driver updates to load some game that they’re probably just going to get mad at and quit playing after 20 hours.
of course, there are also all the Indy games that are cheap and fun too.
there’s something really sad, stupid and insidious about how consumer commodification has degraded the pursuit of a desirable gaming experience to be less important than the appearance of having had a gaming experience aka FOMO. far too many people are out there, completely miserable in their gaming experience, so they can represent themselves as consuming games correctly.
the notion of asking oneself what one wants to get out of a gaming experience and then seeking satisfaction is somehow eccentric.
WHEN games do inevitably become 80-100 dollars, I’ll definitely be buying more Indie games
I haven’t payed full price for a game for like 5 years. They were all either on sale or pirated (unless indie)
