Game prices for the past 30 years haven’t kept pace with inflation.
I recognise the argument that publishers are shifting larger volumes of units now, which has been a factor that has allowed the industry to keep price increases below inflation for the last 30 years.
Wages not being even close to keeping up with inflation (especially housing inflation) is the real issue here, not the $70/$80 video game.
You should be angry at your reduced purchasing power in all of society, not just with the price of Nintendo games.
(Secondary less unpopular opinion, the best games out these days are multiplatform and released at least 5 years ago, buy them for << $80 and wait for sale the new releases, when they too are 5 years old)
You must log in or register to comment.
Are the game developers and artists wages now being increased by the same percentage though? You are correct overall, especially in places like the UK where wages have been stagnant since like 2008 it feels like. But letting a company off the hook for raises “due to inflation” if they themselves are not raising their workers salaries to meet that inflation is bullshit.
Welcome to being an adult and finally realizing capitalism mainly involves screwing the workers and increasing product prices to make investors happy. We were never meant to be happy, just milked to death.
The math works out to be the CEOs pay raise is high enough, that on average with all the other 99.99% of the workers, it has kept up with inflation.
Good news, wages are no longer stagnant! Minimum wage has started to catch up to many professional jobs at this point. Outside of London anyway.
While wages are an issue, AAA gaming is more about C-suite satisfaction and the continued growth of the capitalist way of life.
Indie devs can make gold for $9.99.
Indie devs can make gold for $9.99.
I’ve spent less than $20 for all of the Vampire Survivors content, and gotten 250 hours of enjoyment out of it.
Sucks to suck, EA.
A big problem is ignorant Csuite scaling up a games developer studio and expecting more cooks in the kitchen will make a higher quality product.
The indie teams make great full experiences with realistic scope because it’s a team of like 20 or less who are all on the same page instead of hundreds of employees.
Indie devs have infinitely less overhead than AAA game studios, so of course they can.
Yes I mentioned the C-suite…
And they have infinitely less funding and marketing. They don’t have the overhead but they don’t have the benefits of that overhead either and will succeed.
The problem is throw-away game culture and generally low quality games. A good game can provide you with years of content and would be well worth a >$80 price tag.
But people keep paying the same prices for trash games they play for 2 weeks and then move on. And honestly, they deserve these prices.
But then there’s Factorio for $35
I totally agree with you. And I want to add the games that you can only experience once, like Tunic, PEZ and OuterWilds.
And I’d change the “years of content” to something like “you can play it once every few years and it’s still good”
And I’d change the “years of content” to something like “you can play it once every few years and it’s still good”
I would not.
If you have a game you can only play once a every few years, its probalby a singleplay/campaign only game. THOSE are the issue. Get a game with a good multiplayer and you can play it perpetually … for decades even.
Single player campaigns are literally the best type of games. Fomo bullshit, constant nagging to buy stuff, and relying on internet dickheads for the experience and hoping they won’t just grief or insult everyone the whole time is awful.
And they hated jesus for he spoke the truth.
Smash Bros and MarioKart come to my mind. Particularly MarioKart64 and the 4-Player Versus mode (the best)
A lot of people, and I mean a heck of a lot of people, don’t like multiplayer games. And a lot of people don’t like those long games like AnimalCrossing. A lot of people hate sandbox games like Minecraft, and I know a lot of people who hate open world games like the Witcher. I like frustrating games like Celeste and Kaizo ROM hacks, both of them are hated by a lot of people.
There’s games for everyone, and that’s good. The problem is the quality of the games.
That’s a very self-centric view. Single player games exist because sometimes I want to immerse in a game world not deal with 3 randos(or even friends) and do “the objective” over and over. Yeah multi-player can be fun, but it is a a lot less immersive and rarely as relaxing.
Sure, nothing wrong with single player games in general. But I wouldn’t pay $80 for a game that can be “finished” in a couple of days. If people want to do that, that’s fine of course. But don’t complain about game prices if you’re specifically selecting the games with the worst playtime/price ratio.
If you’re “finished” with an $80 single player game in a couple of days either the game was shit or the way you play without doing any side stuff or more difficult achievements means single player isn’t for you. A good single player game is worth replaying or trying new things in. Personally a game that gives at least an hour of play per dollar is worth it to me.
No, I was actually considering multiple playthroughs as well as clearing it to 100%. (Though some games also put in some ridicilous grinds that make reaching 100% extremly time-consuming, those I consider asshole design and are not included).
I’m talking a couple of days playtime, not a couple of days real time.
an hour of play per dollar
That’s only 3.333 days of playtime for an $80 game … I don’t think that is very good.
Do you play 24h a day? An 80h game will take me months. If it is enjoyable for those 80h that is well worth for me. I don’t want to spend hours struggling and getting griefed or playing smurfs just to get to a point where I know the “meta” or whatever. I’m not in the position to grind and compete in those games anymore. I’m done with them except for special occasions. Overwatch, DRG, helldivers etc not fun for me. Yeah, I’ll still play l4d2 or rocket league occasionally. I put my time in tf2 and guild wars, but I’m still in act I of Baldurs Gate III and it’s fun and interesting. Hades is great (though runs are a little long). I’ll get horizon zero dawn and hades 2 at some point. I’m not getting overwatch 2 or whatever the modern multi-player is.
Fuck multiplayer. Been there, did that for years before it turned to shit.
Modern multiplayer games all just use gambling addiction tactics and FOMO to keep you coming back instead of providing a good experience.
Damn, you’re playing the wrong multiplayer games.
There aren’t many multiplayer games without loot boxes, limited time offers for real money, or pay to win mechanics anymore.
You’re probably right, I wouldn’t know. I play very few games and even fewer recent ones. Last one I picked up is Age of Empires IV, but as a classic RTS sequel it doesn’t suffer from any of the things you mentioned.
Adding to that - Nintendo is one of the few devs that actually consistently provides the kind of games you’re talking about. I feel like Ubisoft selling their next cookie-cutter shopping-list BS for $80 is offensive, but Nintendo doing it is bearable and maybe even justifiable.
I do worry that Nintendo’s $80 price tag will normalize $80 games. Ideally, it would be nice if it instead normalized seeing games at a wider variety of fair prices.
This comment deserves 90$ games.
Game prices are absolutely a problem still. The price of a game is just the entry fee. Then there’s subscriptions, MTX, etc. If you add in everything you need to make a game a complete experience like they were pre-download era, games cost more even with inflation factored in.
Depend on the game. There are still many single players games that don’t have any MTX etc, Sony first party games are like that, and so are most Nintendo games. Sony often release a DLC, which cost more, but that’s more money for more content, and you don’t need DLC.
Thankfully, that’s true! But looking at the industry as a whole, they’re making far more money than they ever have and the costs of creating physical copies has even decreased significantly since it’s mostly digital now. Games with a heavy focus on online play or that have MTX should cost less, but they never do.
Completely agree, for every case where the increased price may makes sense, there are dozens (if not hundreds) where it makes no sense at all (other than increasing the profit of shareholders, which makes complete sense).
This is really about late stage capitalism and chasing infinite growth. Every year profits must go up X percentage. There is never enough. So they have to find ways to make it to up, cutting wages and increasing prices is the obvious way.
An $80 game today is cheaper than $60 games decades ago. There are also a large category of free to play games which didn’t exist before the Internet.
They also don’t have to print games to discs and ship them around the world anymore.
They also don’t have to develop their own engines. Some dude with little to no experience can make a functional game in a few days now. Not to mention functions in UE5 like LOD control do a lot of the work that devs had to handle.
They also have Moore’s Law on their side: The average laptop can now develop what required a $10,000 workstation in 2000.
They also now pack games with microtransactions to make even more money.
They also now sell DLC for games to make more money.
They also now re-release games, which takes a fraction of the effort and still charge a disproportionate price.
Games, objectively, should be cheaper. This is just the hunger for more and more.
Yep, and truth be told if I had the option of paying 90 € for an actual physical copy without microtransactions, DLC instead of having all content in the game from launch, no online access required and no copy protection on the disc, I’d gladly pay that. 100 € even, if it’s a particularly good game.
But I have zero trust in that being the case with the increased prices, it’s just going to be the same thing we now have, more expensively.
Hell ya, I would, too, 100%. Imagine actually owning a game with all of the content on a disk you can share and resell.
I agree with you, though; there is no incentive for companies to do this; they would make less money and have less control over the content. They can’t stand that.
I would also like to add that 30 years ago devs had to write the engine and devtools from scratch. Player hardware and optimizations were also massive pain points that needed attention.
I would argue that cost of development has gotten CHEAPER than it was 30 years ago, even when taking the scope of today’s games into account. Not to mention the market is also orders of magnitude bigger.
Any schmuk today can take Unity/UE5/Godot and make something playable in a matter of days. Barrier to entry is practically non existent. Look at Palworld, Vampire Survivors, Among Us, Balatro, Terraria. For studios with AAA-level scope look at Larian studios, Warhorse studios, Eleventh hour games, Hello games.
Large studio execs with 0 substance who don’t know what they’re doing are spouting this inflation drivel as justification to raise prices of their already failing games as AA and indie teams run CIRCLES around them.
Maybe development in the sense that it is easier for programmers to put together the logic of the game, but game budgets are in the hundreds of millions now they have not gotten cheaper. You’re forgetting that artists are needed to create all the high quality textures and objects needed to populate the gameworld. As gamers have called for more and more unrealistic standards of graphical fidelity, more and more budgets have gone to the legions of graphical artists necessary.
They’re still underpaying them, but indies can get away with having maybe one guy as their whole art team. Check the credits for how many studios helped the art for the next AAA game you play.
Honestly looking at the most popular games, I dont think graphics matter to even 1% of gamers. Minecraft, Terraria, lethal company, baltro, among us, all have the graphical quality of a 2 year old drawing.
Publishers are just spending a million to underpay artists solely because ‘graphics’ worked back in the ps2-ps3 era, so theyre still hitting that slot machine hoping for the same returns.
Edit to add: tunic, factorio (technically) Tetris, temple run, hill climb racing, Wii sports (arguably nindendos entire style until recently), human fall flat all have incredibly cheap graphics
Stylized graphics can look great for cheap, but they aren’t a shortcut to instant success. For every successful indie, there are a thousand more that never sell more than a handful of copies.
Yes, the point was that having real-time raytracing and realistic ultra-resolution rendering is not worth the cost either, when games with cheaper graphics are doing better (and also require less expensive hardware)
So?
Doesnt mean expensive ones are an instant success either, if anything I’m agreeing with you that graphics are irrelevant to sales
if anything I’m agreeing with you that graphics are irrelevant to sales
I didn’t say this.
As gamers have called for more and more unrealistic standards of graphical fidelity, more and more budgets have gone to the legions of graphical artists necessary.
This is one of the things I personally like the least about modern games. I don’t want ultra-high detail textures for 4K resolution that will be completely wasted on my not-so-new hardware. Instead, I’d rather have optimized games that don’t intoduce 100+ GB of bloat and require me to set all the graphic options to minimum quality in order to run with a decent fps.
As gamers have called for more and more unrealistic standards of graphical fidelity
Been around long enough to remember it wasn’t the gamers doing that, it was the game makers. Specifically the c-suites
There’s 0 justification for games going up in cost other than the c-suites, end of story
While I agree that 1 person can make a game easier than ever before, game development cost has ballooned for bigger studios.
People love to point to Indie mega hits and say “why doesn’t EA/Activision just make games with creativity like Balatro? This is what the people want.”, but I challenge anyone to actually predict what that hit game is going to be before it takes off.
It’s a big gamble to put games out there and most indie studios don’t make more than 1. It’s not a reliable business model to put these thousand person studios to work on a thousand different solo pet projects.
What has gotten much more expensive is the 3D modelling and level/gamespace making side of things, rather than development, which is why you see so many indies doing 2D games or simple 3D visuals and procedural generation of the gamespace.
This is partly why indie studios are far more successful at producing games with great gameplay than AAA studios - since they avoid going for hyper-realistic looks and massive hand-crafted levels they can focus on the actual gaming much more, plus its way easier to pivot main aspects of a game if it turns out they’re not actually fun if there isn’t a massive amount of time sunk into visuals and level design linked to them.
Yeah this is absolutely correct. When you look at prices and adjust for inflation $80 now is about right.
The value of money has gone down, and the value of pay cheques and salaries have not increased to keep up.
Unfortunately this often gets sidelined with “what aboutism” - like what about the dysfunctional AAA market, and predatory big publishers like EA that churn our crap, or all the publishers trying to build microtransactions into games. These are also ALL valid issues, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals that video games cost around $80 in 2000 when adjusted for inflation.
The video game industry can be dysfunctional AND we’re also being screwed over by dysfunctional unequal capitalism causing declining living standards at the same time.
no. they don’t even make physical media anymore. the cost is lowered on each copy. they ask for a ton of extra payments. they can suck shit and die. games can be 30 bucks and still stay profitable. the games industry makes more money than Hollywood. stop defending them while they’re trying to pluck your last dime.
How much did a video game cost to make compared to today?
Same thing with movies. With everything.
We’re not playing polygon tomb raider anymore.
how many copies could they sell back then vs now? how much did it cost to make, stock and ship a physical copy worldwide vs being able to provide infinite copies everywhere only using the bandwidth when necessary?
no one’s asking for billions to be spent on games. companies being horribly managed by businessman who have no idea how games work or what’s important in a game, forcing i live service bullshit, chasing trends, making big empty worlds full of pointless busywork does not mean the games should cost 80 dollars.
ninja theory already proved you can make an insanely good looking game with a tiny budget and sell it for 30 bucks and turn a profit. meanwhile the biggest companies including ones owned by evil billionaires can easily shit out concord and starfields wasting years and millions on steaming turds.
also things haven’t only become more expensive. they’ve become cheaper too. there are more tools, better hardware and software for cheaper if not free that allows people to do more than ever before with less than ever before. the indie scene is 1000x more powerful today than it was back then for this reason.
and you’re talking about polygon tomb raider while these companies are trying to sell you recolored skins for 10 bucks even though it took an unpaid intern about 45 seconds to use a color swap on a 2d texture.
Wow this is incredible. I get to reuse my meme I just made a few days ago! Now that’s what I call value
I mean both are the problem, obviously. And they’re both symptoms of tne larger problem, which is late stage capitalism slowly sucking every last drop of labor value out of everyone. Game companies are making more profits than they did 30 years ago, so you can’t tell me they ‘need’ to raise prices. And their CEO salaries are higher than ever, and developer salaries have not risen accordingly to justify the price increase. If a game company said ‘we’re raising our prices from 60 to 90 dollars, but we’re also giving every employee a 1/3 salary increase’ people might not be happy still but it would be a different conversation. But why should people who are struggling have to pay more for nothing except an increase in ‘shareholder value’ and the c-suites salary package? Thats fucked.
The fact that they’re moving more units doesn’t matter, everything, including things for which the price followed inflation, sells more units than it did 40 years ago just because there’s more people on the planet and globalism is a thing.
What matters is that that money goes to enrich billionaires and not the developers making the product people are buying.
Steam takes a 30% cut on the first $10m in sales (then 25% until $50m and then 20%) and they pay their employees a lot more than industry average and the owner is a multi billionaire with a yacht collection. Same shit for publishers, the c-suites are rich from “managing” the intermediary between the development studio and the retailers, they don’t give a crap about the product as long as it sells.
Meanwhile the devs making the games have a hard time affording housing, need to deal with crunches and get laid off once the game they were working on is completed.
And what about us, the consumers? Well we’re no better off than the developers and we’re still enriching a bunch of billionaires while most of us struggle to afford basic needs.
Both publishers and retailers could afford to reduce their cut and lower prices OR to reduce their cut and leave more money to the people making the products they sell and the impact would only be felt by a handful of people (in Steam’s case, by a single person).
Just as a sidenote here, the “issue” with steam is that it doesn’t have any real competition. Steam just does everything better than any other game launcher and that’s probably in part because of their policy.
On the gamedev side they allow you to market to a huge audience as a small creator and give you a chance to make it big (think Balatro, Signal 1, and a lot of other indie games as of recent)
On the gamer side they’ve made buying, updating and doing anything around the games so much easier than it used to be and not a single launcher has been able to do it as good as them. They’ve released one of the best VR headsets on the market that still hasn’t been beaten years later. They’ve released the first good Linux based PC handheld both giving a huge boost to that market and improving proton so gaming on Linux is actually possible (outside of games with anti-cheats that don’t allow linux)
I’m not saying them taking 30% from almost any sale done on steam is good, but at least they are able to give a service for it that not a single other company has done, they’re probably the most pro gamer company in the industry right now (together with game studios like Larian)
Also, yes devs should be paid a lot more for their work and the average person should also have a higher salary to beat inflation cause life is just too damn expensive!
Competition or not, the guy at the top still decided that being a multi billionaire was more important than the quality of life of his clients or the world poorest. No one forces anyone to own a yacht collection. No one forces anyone to be a billionaire. At any point he could have decided to stop accumulating wealth and to give away what he would otherwise gain to charities.
Remember when Musk said if he could fix world hunger for $6B he would do it and then he didn’t? ALL billionaires are guilty of the same thing.
Edit: keep downvoting guys, I’m sure Gaben will be glad you defended him
The prices should go down to 40$(or stay 60$ based on inflation) if I dont actually own the game imo. If the company is going to be so bold as to sell “game keys” with no actual data on the cart, coupled with the fact that the EShop has been shut down on the WiiU and 3DS(you can redownload games still, but how long until that goes away?). To me is a huge middle finger, and basically planned obsolesence on the switch 2 since you will no longer be able to redownload your games once they stop supporting the consoles servers.
If i do the “smart” thing and get the switch 2 after a major price drop, every games lifespan will be even shorter. fuck nintendo, mod your switch & switch 2(when thats available) pirate everything from them and get your moneys worth for the overpriced hardware.
Laughs in v1 switch with active tinfoil eshop 🤘😸🖕
if i do the “smart” thing and get the switch 2 after a major price drop
No the smart thing is never giving Nintendo your money.
There are so many problems with the industry today, but the amount of venom in the discourse around $80 Mario Kart has felt bizarre to me. I do feel that there are much worse problems.
Like it’s worth mentioning how a lot of games already are well above $80 after DLC anyway, but I guess those games get a pass? Or just how fucked up most F2P business models are, exploiting whales to subsidize everybody else. I’d rather play a game where everyone pays a fair price than one where addicts are taken advantage of and encouraged to financially ruin themselves.
I don’t often buy games at full price myself. Only for a handful of IPs I really love, or multiplayer games I want to get in on the ground floor of, anything else I’ll wait for a sale. But the way I see it, if Kirby Air Ride 2 costs $80, I’m willing to spend $80 on that game because I know I will get that much enjoyment out of it. I’ve waited 22 years for this sequel, it’s worth it to me!
And I think ultimately, you gotta just buy the things that are worth it to you, skip the things that aren’t, and then chill the fuck out.
Like it’s worth mentioning how a lot of games already are well above $80 after DLC anyway, but I guess those games get a pass?
They do not, at all. Though, what do you think games will cost if the base is $80 and DLC is still a thing? Cuz the answer is more than it does now
Or just how fucked up most F2P business models are, exploiting whales to subsidize everybody else.
Also discussed all the time and is, in fact, one of the reasons this new price becoming a standard is worrying as it’s not just F2P games that do this shit
I’d rather play a game where everyone pays a fair price than one where addicts are taken advantage of and encouraged to financially ruin themselves
We all would, but that’s not what we’re going to get out of the price hike and you know it
But the way I see it, if Kirby Air Ride 2 costs $80, I’m willing to spend $80 on that game
And you’re the problem. That becomes the standard for all games now that Nintendo has broken the seal with their nostalgia spell and you helped them. How about you just pirate it if it’s so important that you play it, rather than directly support the death of the industry?
And I think ultimately, you gotta just buy the things that are worth it to you, skip the things that aren’t, and then chill the fuck out.
You seem to live in a world where Nintendo aren’t making decisions that impact the industry. If Nintendo makes more expensive games OK to do then every game gets more expensive. We don’t get to be selective, that’s the whole point
If you’re gonna accuse me of “supporting the death of the industry” for playing something I enjoy, you are exactly who I am talking to when I say chill the fuck out.
for playing something I enjoy
No, for mindlessly buying something at a higher price and then writing paragraphs defending yourself
When games cost $100+ it’s people like you that will be partly responsible, and that will cost me more money, so I will not “chill the fuck Out” and let you consume without pointing out what you’re doing
especially if you’re aware enough to be multi-paragraph defensive from the get-go
I’m going to play the games I like. Go away.
Removed by mod
No. I do not agree with you acting like it’s the end of the world, and you’re not going to tell me what to do.
Removed by mod
Game price isn’t a problem, just don’t buy their games.
For £90 you could buy mario cart, or you would start a genocide in Rimworld and still have enough money left over for automated genocide in Factorio and if you are willing to go over by £3.48 you can also commit genocide from orbit in Stellaris.
Wow all that genocide for the low low price of $93.48 where do I sign?
Stellaris is like $200 if you don’t want features pay-walled from you. And good luck playing a Paradox game the week it comes out - you get to add “Software Tester - Unpaid” to your CV.
RimWorld is $35 so for £90 ($119) you could buy three copies and give them to two friends so you all can make some hats (human leather).
I’ve considered this, especially after watching moistcritikal’s very sarcastic rant on the matter. Nowhere in it does he mention the living wages of the devs, artists, and creators of the games, just that the price increase seems insane. Fact is, I remember when a pack of unfiltered camels smokes would run you about 75 cents, and the prices now are near, if not double digits.
Gonna take a lot of work to shift the mindset from “games should never cost more than d dollars” to “we need to develop a financial system whereby inflation doesn’t matter to us”.
Cigarette prices are so high because of the stupidity taxes that government tacks on so people have to pay exorbitant amounts to slowly kill themselves and those in close proximity (and add unneeded stress to our health care system down the road).
