Re: Thanks a lot, Nintendo!

On Sat, 3 May 2025 08:57:13 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

On 5/3/2025 8:03 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

but let's face it, games have been
underpriced for too long.

>
Speak for yourself there buddy!!

I don't personally want the price of games to go up either, but the
fact is that video games prices have stagnated for decades. We've been
lucky enough that games have been in the $40-60USD range for almost
twenty years, even though prior to that (in the 80s and 90s), new game
prices were regularly in the $70-80 range (taking into account
inflation, a $70 game in 1996 would be $140 today). Even budget titles
of that era would sell for the 2025 equivalent of $70-90.

And games have gotten A LOT more complex and expensive to develop than
the relatively simple creations of thirty years ago. Those titles were
developed by a small handful of developers and artists; teams of 50 or
more were almost unheard of. Today's titles often require teams
numbering in the hundreds or thousands.

     [Whether or not you think we NEED games like that isn't
      the point. I myself have often argued that publishers
      need to scale back the scope of their games. But right
      now big games are BIG and need a lot more money to create
      than earlier games]

To some degree, publishers have been able to offset the cost of
development by selling more individual titles; "We'll make it up in
volume!". This has disadvantages, of course (games have to become more
generic and able to please wider audiences in order to make their
money back. But even that could only be stretched so far, and
publishers have reached out for new forms of income... usually to the
detriment of the hobby (e.g., grindy 'live service' gameplay,
lootboxes, overpriced expansions containing content that once would
have been included in the base game, cosmetic MTX, etc.).

The plain fact is that the current standard retail cost of games
($50-60USD) cannot cover the cost of developing modern titles anymore.
It's been long overdue for a rise.

Now, the terrible thing is that a lot of publishers will jerk up the
price and then STILL milk their customers with awful MTX/live-service
nonsense. Or that some of this problem could have been avoided --or at
least further delayed-- by not making games that require
half-a-billion dollars to create. But long term, the price had to go
up.

[And all that even without taking into account the malicious havoc the
Americans are wreaking on the world economy.]