(sorry if it’s the wrong place for this kind of discussion)
Yesterday The Riftbreaker raised its price 50% for base game and 65% for dlcs. I know Steam said all devs to adjust prices(in January), but this feel more of trend where once a game gets popular the price skyrocket.
As someone who waits a game go 75% or a stable 50% discount before buying it, if i didnt buy it by then sure i ain’t buying that now unless there is a massive discount (not even gonna talk about games that raise price to fake a bigger discount).
I dont want to sound cheap; I grew up with no condition to buy games and spent a lot of my internet in torrents in my youth, now i gladly pay for games but once a game raise its price i unwishlist it.
Patient gamers gang?
You know it, baby
Yup.
I’m 40. I’ve been gaming since opening Super Mario Land one afternoon in 92/93. I’ve spent money on more games than I can count (literally as I’ve bought and sold my entire physical collection numerous times over the years).
At this point: Game comes out, I pirate it. Once it’s below $20, I’ll buy it (assuming it wasn’t shit, obviously). If I get tired of it before then, it gets Wishlisted until I can buy it below $20 in the future and I spend the next chunk of time playing one of the millions of games that have come out in the last 40ish years which I’ve missed instead.
You ever see me spending $70/$80 or more for a game for the rest of my life you best fucking call me a doctor and let my wife know I may not be coming home.
Game comes out, I pirate it
My name is Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate
lmao I just finished this with my gf last week, fantastic game
Abandon the FOMO completely. I do not reward shitty behavior. Destiny 2’s launch was the end of that. Let other people pay top dollar to playtest it and work all the wrinkles out. Let all the DLC come out and the game GOTY edition if it’s that good. Let others buy that. THEN, when they are going to launch the sequel, all of that pap will be sold at basement-level prices. Maybe wait a bit longer if it was really popular.
I’m playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 right now. ;-)
While you’re overall right, DOS 2 is a terrible exemple for that.
Some of us learned with Destiny 1 and it saddens me they got so many more
victimscustomers with Destiny 2I got that lesson with call of duty ghost and assassin’s creed 3 back in 2013. I was extremely hyped for the games and they both ended up sucking.
After that I will just buy a game after it’s been out for a couple months
Meh AC3 was a complete game you didn’t enjoy (valid reason not to pre-order still!) so I’d say it’s less flagrant than destiny et al which nickel and dime you as they manufacture FOMO. Bungie’s list of sins is much longer lol
I don’t see any price change for that game looking at the price history (USD). It’s possible you’re seeing an adjustment in exchange rates which would only see an increase in certain currencies.
As for what I think, I generally just ignore base prices and only buy games when they are a price I’m willing to pay for what they provide.
Perhaps it’s was the regional price, Steamdb link, funny enough, the price change history vanished(dlc still recorded) but still has the new price.
Just don’t buy them, they are not going anywhere. Wait for a decent sale.
@[email protected] for me, it just means that I’m not going to pick it up longer. I’ll wait until the price drops to a dollar amount that makes sense to me.
Inflation means things cost more. Games and other things will continue to rise in price.
If your not comfortable paying the price of a game, then the best thing is to wait for prices to start falling or for a sale.
It’s bound to happen, but not every game needs to be bought at launch, the game will still be available for purchase at a later date.
The last time games were increased in price I was in grade school, 50 to 60, a 10 dollar increase. I wrote a letter to nintendo actually and got a response basically saying costs were up in the nicest way you could to a child.
That was well over 15 years ago, so the extra 10 they tacked on was honestly coming eventually. Everything else in life is getting expensive so of course it was only a matter of time until it reached this part of our lives, its really basic economics.
A comparison to keep in mind is also that we were still buying physical copies of games when the last increase happened, now we are strictly digital for a large majority of purchases while this next increase has happened.
But luckily this increase in price seems to be a trend only taken on by AAA companies, which are hit and miss in their titles lately imo, so most will be on sale in a year and you won’t ever have to pay 70 unless you are really into that title. Most indie companies are pricing their games at around 30-40 dollars right out of the gate and honestly have more of the spirit of what video games should be.
Go back 15 years before that and SNES games were $70-$90 at retail.
What’s your issue with pricing?
I don’t have an issue with the pricing I was just explaining why I think the pricing isn’t an issue (didn’t really state this clearly) strictly due to economic pressures and giving just a little bit of background as to why. Because honestly like you said, games historically have been more expensive in the past. And they have lightned up on prices in the past two decades only to gradually increase them with tons of time in between for whatever reason they site.
Just another thought here but I honestly think the micro transaction economy we’ve gotten in games the past few years probably stifled the price increase just a little longer.
If a game costs what I’m willing to pay for it, I buy it, if it doesn’t, I check G2A, if still not, wishlist and wait for sale. They can do what they like with prices but I’ve got my pain limit.
Apart from From Software stuff, I will buy all of those.
It’s not better to pirate than buy at G2A ?
It’s unavoidable. Not only are player expectations for bigger and better looking games getting higher every year, but games are also becoming more expensive to make due to bigger teams and global economic inflation. Luckily I think indie games will continue to exist at a range of prices, but I expect them to get a bit more expensive too because inflation affects everything.
Look at steam DB. Many games move the prices around up down constantly. Even higher than their previous plateau. It’s all about creating urgency for sales.
The price of games hasn’t gone up in decades. We’re only just starting to see games that cost $70 instead of $60.
The cost to develop games, on the other hand, has gone way, way, way up.
Think about it in “cost per megabyte”. Players have been getting more and more content - not playable hours, but content that needs to be created by a human - for the same amount of money. While developers have larger and larger staff, with more and more demands… For the same amount of money.
There’s a reason live-service and freemium games are becoming the monetization scheme of choice.
Cost of games needs to go up or we’ll just see more and more exploitative monetization.
Let me also add that $60 for 20 hours of entertainment is one of the best deals there is. And the best games give a lot more than 20 hours of gameplay. Books are about the only thing that comes close
Regarding “cost per megabyte”…
I see your point, but for me it is more important the “entertainment per €/$” factor, and there you can’t beat indie games.
I’ve bought the whole Halo collection… that’s a metric ton of megabytes right there, but I’ve only installed it once and never again. In contrast, I’ve bought Loop Hero (about 200 MB) and haven’t been able to put it down since. That’s a lot more value for money, in my opinion.
That’s you :) I bought the halo collection and spent >200hrs playing it. I have >1600hrs in the Destiny franchise. Can’t just look at your own experience :)
The cost to develop has gone down, if anything. You don’t need powerful hardware. You don’t need expensive industry software. You don’t need proprietary devkits. You can create a perfectly good game on an old laptop with Blender, Krita, Aseprite, Unity, Unreal, Godot. You can target consoles on regular hardware and regular consoles.
Before, a handful of people could develop the most technically advanced game of the year. Today it’s common that hundreds of overworked people are involved in the development of a game.
Each person must have their own expensive equipment and salaries. Not to mention the cost of renting an office. The costs adds up quickly.
Smaller games made by one or two people are probably cheaper, but the cost of these games aren’t $70 like the big budget games.
Tell me you don’t make games without telling me you don’t make games.
You can make perfectly good games, yes. But good luck making anything AAA like that. The games you’re talking about are indie or niche. For example, they will have no mocap.
And even in those cases, there is a difference between “cost to start a studio” and “cost to develop a game”. The costs you’re talking about are the cost of getting started. Those are barrier to entry costs, not development costs. When we talk about development costs, we typically talk about everything after you have all the hardware and software you need. Studios already have those things so they barely factor into the ongoing development costs
Also you only don’t need proprietary dev kits if you have no intention of doing per-platform QA. Fine for indies. Not fine for AAA
Yes, the barrier to entry has gone down; the minimum cost to ship something, anything, is lower than ever…but only by comparison to the peak cost. Even small indie studios are spending as much as studios did when making $60 NES games
Sure, if you want to only talk about AAA games, yeah, the cost is going up. But in general, cost has gone down.
Unless you only one scrappy in the games made by three person dev team they really haven’t. The cost for making a game that was good in 2015 has gone down, sure. But it behooves you to show that game development in general, and yes that includes indie developers, has gone down.
A 10 person dev team in any major city is going to cost you between $500,000 and $1mill a year just to staff.
I’m not only talking about AAA. I’m pointing out some of the things you missed in your assessment.
Like I said, even indie studios today spend more to make their non-sprite, full featured games than studios did making NES games. And then those indie games sell for $20 or $30 instead of the full $60 price point. So the content-to-development cost ratio is still shit
That’s really not the bulk of development costs though: The real cost is in labour; as game dev teams have increased the labour costs will increase too. Delay in game? Costs go up.
It’s offset by the industry becoming bigger; back then a game selling 100k is a huge success, now it’s more like 10 million. At some point that’ll cap so that’s why the studios area increasing prices now. Oh and if the studio is public, they need to feed the
parasitesshareholders.I generally don’t buy big games of late so I’ve not had to put up with super expensive games, but it’s just something to keep in mind why prices are so.
If you’re paying a developer 80k per year, 5k per employee in hardware and licensing is nothing
From a purely financial perspective, yes. From a managerial capex vs opex perspective, no.
Bro I paid $80 for Final Fantasy 3 (now 6) on SNES. From Toys R Us.
Yuuuuup. Price if games has been stagnant for too long
It’s not for the same amount of money, though. Video game sales also went up significantly over the years.
Doom 2 sold less than 2 million copies by 1999 (released in 1994) and made about 100 million. Doom Eternal sold 3 million copies first week and make over 450 million in revenue in just 9 months…
Per Cormack, Doom 2 development cost was $550,000. Doom 2016 dev cost was $90,000,000 (couldn’t find Doom Eternal’s but that should be close)
It’s not about how much one or the other has gone up. It’s about how much they’ve gone up in comparison to eachother
You see more and more exploitative monetization because people are dumb enough to buy into it. The AAA industry is fucked and is not worth investing a penny into, they wouldn’t raise the prices and avoid MTX, they would raise the prices and STILL attempt to fleece as many people as they can with neon skins or whatever bs.
“Businesses try to maximize profit. News at 11”
Like, I’m anticapitalist as hell, but c’mon. Your problem is with capitalism, not game dev
Your comment is talking about monetisation, which the devs have nothing to do with apart from implementing the features. So what even is this response? I dont understand your point now.
Well, I can say from personal experience, devs absolutely have a say in monetization if they’re not wholly owned by the publisher.
But my point is that I was speaking to the motivation businesses have to prefer one monetization scheme over another. Your comment was just “corporations evil, micro transactions bad”.
If the cost of games had kept up with inflation and development costs, micro transactions wouldn’t be nearly the beast it is today because there would have been a viable alternative, and customers would have more options, allowing them to “speak with their wallet” more effectively. But as it stands, it is very, very difficult for most developers to sustain themselves on single-burst, long-tail tail monetization
When a games been sitting in my wishlist for a while it’s usually there for a reason. Sometimes it’s just that I have a glut of other games to play in that genre, sometimes I’m waiting for the game to improve. But usually it’s because I’ve looked at the game and said “I don’t think it’s worth that price” and am waiting for it to fall to something I consider reasonable. Obviously, a price hike isn’t going to help it reach that point.
I looked at Riftbreaker’s steam DB page and it looks like it was only some countries who got a price spike, so I’m guessing it was some sort of currency re-balancing. You know, the Ruble is weak so prices relative to the Dollar went up or whatever. All that being said my first point stands, if I didn’t want to buy a game at price X , I’m going to want to buy it even less at X * 1.5, regardless of what’s happening in international money markets.
I paid $70 for majoras mask at Walmart back in 2001, if anything games have become immensely cheaper taking into account inflation.
Yea people seem to forget the pricing of n64 catridges back when it was the hot thing like ps5, etc is today. It was actually insane. Considering inflation too, you were paying a lot more for a single game then.
That depends on:
- If the game is in Early access, the price is justified to change as it becomes more fleshed out.
- If the game gets a massive update (Such as Quake II recently) a price raise feels justified.
- Also, none of this applies if the game goes over 60$, you should never pay more than 60$ because of a price raise. But, these are all just my opinions.
