Path: ...!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-4.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 03 May 2025 16:19:58 +0000 From: Spalls Hurgenson Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action Subject: Re: Thanks a lot, Nintendo! Date: Sat, 03 May 2025 12:19:54 -0400 Message-ID: References: <8kbc1k9k3npvq8o6hi08lssdubmp010cvk@4ax.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 53 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-D8gzoAS+HgT0RouYTd3zoH5DGxJLxOt/Vfg+xhgfc4GC3meyzW7i0P3XWKDO7JKdY2JsEP8v4R+pwA1!b1QpOWbjcPOu7f9TDuFuWeeeTBGdK01UN//aK/a9saWEvbkWCMoqlWhT31OpO7qA0NQpXoeb X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 3655 On Sat, 3 May 2025 08:57:13 -0700, Dimensional Traveler 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.]