this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Games have been the same price for over thirty years, they've not changed with inflation and production costs have skyrocketed. To an extent the increased market has helped keep costs down for the consumer but it's not unreasonable to see prices shift upwards.
What about the cost of disc media that's absolutely disappeared? That was a huge chunk of the overhead. Logistics to get the copies to all the stores, etc.
Now it's just electricity and servers to download from.
Do you ever notice that no one ever talks about all the advancements that saved money? Of course not, cause then they'd never be able to justify continually hiking the prices up.
Distribution platforms like Steam charge 30% for their service.
I am genuinely not trying to sound like a studio apologist, because there are myriad reasons to be upset with them, but y'all need to think these arguments through a little better. I haven't pulled up any numbers, but are we really going to pretend that the cost of producing a game in 1990 is even remotely comparable to that of a modern day AAA game? The fact that video game costs have remained relatively steady and even decreased in some cases for decades should be astonishing.
Pick a different argument.
Pick a non-strawman argument and then we can have a discussion. They had different methods of creating games yes, but were they easier back then than they are now? I don't think so, they had people inventing the fucking wheel of what could be possible and we still had a consistent price tag with a FEATURE COMPLETE package. They didn't have as many workers as they did because all of the programming went to those individual developers to figure out. The amount of work is more intricately spread out in these bigger studios, but the passion and creativeness was more alive back in the early days. None of it was automated with fully polished dev tools and externally hired language teams.
How are you missing that you are literally comparing a team of 5 programmers and artists to games made by 500+ people?
I mean seriously you can read, that alone should be enough.
The only strawman argument here is yours. Most people wouldn't play a game released today if it looked like Pong and had the same gameplay features. Also, there are a lot more wheels to invent today.
I'm not just talking about Pong, and that is another good example of a strawman argument ironically.
Lots of games today force some sort of online element (ex. Cloud saves, workshop content, multiplayer, etc.) I wonder how much that costs them to maintain. I can't imagine it's that significant if they are dealing with multiple single player games.
Probably not as much as the money they derive from the live service model.
Businesses do what makes them the most money.
Steam is more expensive than discs.
There's no way in hell that paying steam is more expensive than buying dics, putting your game on those discs, putting those discs in cases, and then paying to ship those cases all over the world.
Know how I know? Because businesses do whatever is the most profitable, and clearly digital distro is cheaper since we've been pushing for it since it was invented.
The customer base has increased more than a thousandfold. If anything prices should go down.
Yeah my parents were paying $60 for NES games for me... Which is why I had like 3 NES games. The only reason game aren't $180 now is competition... And reproducibility vs size of market... And physical media is cheap or non-existent. Ok there are a few reasons, but still...