Comment on The Outer Worlds 2 - Official Story Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2025
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
$80 people
The Atari 2600 released for $190 in 1977. Or about $1000 today.
The best selling title, Pac-Man released for $28 in 1982. Or about $95 today.
Compared to so much else that has risen dramatically over time, vastly outpacing video games comparatively, I think it’s a bit hard to argue with the value proposition of modern titles.
Games at that time were cutting edge technology, distribution networks didn’t exist, physical units had to make it to stores, etc. The environment isn’t the same. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think $80 is terribly outrageous in our modern economy but at that price point it has better provide 60+ hours of entertainment. If outer worlds 2 is as good as #1 it’s worth $40 tops. I played that game end to end and can’t recall a single characters name.
I agree about everything in your first point. I hadn’t previously considered that the novelty of a new technology would necessarily increase have disproportionately high initial cost.
That said, I feel like any calculation of cost against how many hours played is entirely subjective. Your suggestion of $0.75 / entertainment hour is quite different than what I consider ideal. Games will vary genre to genre, person to person, platform to platform.
A person with limited time might exclusively play shorter titles, or maybe just multiplayer titles. A person with significant free time might spent hundreds of hours replaying an RPG.
To be incredibly broad, I would say that games shouldn’t cost more per entertainment hour than half of what any given person earns at their job - but even that is quite subjective and should be taken with salt.
Hamburgers were 28 cents in 1977.
Too bad burgers outpaced inflation then. It’d be nice to have a $1.50 option commonly available.
Groceries are a small fortune
I think looking at it through an “all else equal” mindset is a little misleading.
Back then it was basically space-age technology. Video games were leaps and bounds ahead of other forms of entertainment, techwise. You could somewhat justify the expense because there was literally nothing like it in existence.
Nowadays? People make video games for classes in high school. I can write a flappy bird game on my phone and play it there. Small projects with less than 50 people regularly end up as bestsellers on Steam. Thousands of titles release on steam every year.
Video game supply is through the fucking roof, yet companies go out of their way to overproduce and underdeliver. QA is nonexistent anymore because of day 1 patches and always-online. They realized a long time ago that when your primary market is children, you can be as absolutely shitty as you want because a parent will give their child anything to shut them up or help them fit in. You can exploit a child’s labor for profit and their parent will pay you just to keep them occupied (Roblox, cough cough).
I mean we all knew video games couldn’t cost $60 for all eternity, but watching the price hike an entire third at once (50% if it costs $90) I think has made people realize just how overvalued video games are in general.
You make a good point, and I agree. I wasn’t thinking that it was the only thing on the market and therefore the price is whatever a new technology costs.
I tend to think of video games - being a form of entertainment - as a great way to be entertained while also being an incredibly low cost option for the amount of time I spend enjoying them.
Buying a $600 console just to enjoy a single $60 title is an extreme example but to me, if that game provides 100 hours of playtime, that seems well worth it. Cheaper than going to a theatre or most other forms of entertainment.
To be sure, I don’t do this, but I’ve always viewed gaming through a $/h lens, and could never understand why so many people saw it as a waste of time. That’s what I was thinking when I wrote that comment earlier - it seems to me that you get more playtime with some RPG from this decade than you would playing Pac-Man. Though perhaps I feel that way because games like Pac-Man don’t appeal to me.
Thinking about it, your point might be valid again, with the Atari being a new technology, people were likely to sink far more hours into a title than they might do with modern games since we have so many to choose from now. I’ve never thought about it that way. Thanks for pointing this out.
I liked the first one but it was free with the 99 cent game pass. It was very short imo and I would have been pissed off I’d paid full price.
Welp, guess I can get this one on sale just like I did the first. This i spent maybe $15-$20 on it?
#PatientGamers
Yup, this is why the $80 price tag doesn’t bother me. I’ve got a backlog of games I want to play that I probably already can’t finish in my lifetime. This will be $20 a year post release and in two years that $20 will get you all the dlc as well.
Yea. The only games I buy on release are fighting games, but that just because during the release window is some of the best fun you can have for the online multiplayer as a casual. After about the first month or so a meta gets established and then everyone online is just playing the same carbon copy of whatever the YouTube pros are doing.
Though these hands are getting old and I think this last release of fighters will be my last. Just can’t keep up anymore.
eronth@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Well, time and a sale it is, then.